Well, another month, another acquisition… Teradata has announced the acquisition of Aster Data. You can find a less formal yet official post on the acquisition in Aster Data’s blog – Mayank and Tasso go into some more details on what Aster Data is all about and why the deal makes a lot of sense to the industry.
Aster Data has focused its energy into developing a low-cost (from a systems footprint perspective) platform to manage and process data at large-scale without imposing restrictions on the types of data being managed and the type of processing being carried out. The resulting platform is a show case for a solid commercial implementation of the much talked about map-reduce approach to big data processing, and has enabled companies from different industries to extract analytic insight from both structured and unstructured data. As a result, they’ve been able to make better decisions leveraging not just the traditional operational data, but also the social data, the web click data, etc…, that is generated in huge numbers around their products and services.
The approach also allows to shorten the time needed to bring that insight back into decisions. This type of close-to-real-time insight makes the understanding of decision impact as well as the their evolution much more dynamic, giving those companies that can leverage it an edge in managing risk and benefiting from trends.
The acquisition is a good move for Teradata. It also re-inforces the following key trends:
- Platform players continue acquiring young innovative companies which solve complex data, analytics and/or decision management problems. Just in this space, EMC bought Greenplum some time ago, IBM bought Netezza, HP bought Vertica…
The consolidation trend will continue - The big data management and processing spaces are merging on unified platforms. There is less and less distinction between managing vast amounts of data and processing them to gain insight, generating more data on the fly.
- Managing and processing non-structured data – which makes up most of big data – is becoming an integral part of what companies need to do to manage the decisions around their products and services. And contrary to popular belief, this is as important in B2B as in B2C.
This is also the consequence of the trend of the importance of the decision data than can be extracted from social data. This will accelerate with Enterprise 2.0. - And finally platform vendors are morphing into Cloud-based/backed Saas providers, and they are making tasks such as the ones enabled by Aster Data accessible at low entry cost.
Exciting times. Congratulations to the Aster Data team.
This, of course, reduces the pool of independent big data management and processing products. InfoBright and ParAccel come to mind – and HP, Dell and the like still need to move in this space. Who wants to start bets?
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