International Business Machines Corp. will invest “hundreds of millions a year” into a free data analytics technology, according to Beth Smith, general manager of the company’s analytics division. The move, announced by the company Monday, follows the hiring of about 20 people for a new technology center in San Francisco to improve and extend a University of California at Berkeley-developed free software project named Spark, which lets people analyze large amounts of data more rapidly than with other technologies such as Hadoop.