Microsoft Closes on DATAllegro, Opens Up on Data Warehouse Road Map

Microsoft having closed on its acquisition of data warehousing vendor DATAllegro, Microsoft officials were ready Sept. 16 to start talking about their road map.

Microsoft has plans to offer software based on DATAllegro's technology in 2010, and to have CTPs (community technology previews) ready within the next 12 months. Though Microsoft officials were unwilling to talk about actual features, the stated plan is to leverage DATAllegro's technology to help SQL Server scale into hundreds of terabytes of data.

"Microsoft has made significant investments in data warehouse scalability in SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008," Fausto Ibarra, Microsoft's director of product management for SQL Server, said in an interview with eWEEK. "The acquisition reinforces Microsoft's comprehensive and integrated BI [business intelligence] … [and] enables everyone to do business intelligence effectively in companies of any size using SQL Server."

The DATAllegro acquisition by Microsoft touched off speculation about whether there would be additional acquisitions in the data warehousing space. There were also questions about how the purchase related to Microsoft's stance on hardware, but Ibarra said Microsoft is not pursuing a hardware strategy with this acquisition.

"Microsoft's core business is software, and although we do have some hardware devices, such as Xbox, we are not a hardware vendor," Ibarra said. "The acquisition of DATAllegro allows Microsoft to expand our already rich ecosystem of hardware partners and solutions with a new software offering we will bring to market."

Founded in 2003, DATAllegro marketed an MPP (massively parallel processing) data warehouse appliance based on the Ingres database. With the close of the acquisition, Microsoft is retaining most of DATAllegro's team and its headquarters in Aliso Viejo, Calif.

More details are expected at the Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference in October.