Teradata planned $263 million acquisition of Aster Data Systems brings big data analytical capabilities in-house.
With
the challenge of managing and analyzing big data growing ever-larger, Teradata
is acquiring Aster Data Systems, a move analysts say is a good one.
"Acquiring
Aster Data won't give Teradata additional market share to battle Oracle,
IBM and Microsoft, as well as EMC and HP, but it does provide the company with
additional technological capabilities for dealing with large and complex data
sets," opined Matt Aslett, an analyst with The 451 Group. "In particular, Aster
Data brings expertise in the MapReduce
programming model and the SQL-MapReduce implementation enables developers
to write MapReduce functions as procedural functions that can then be expressed
in SQL."
Teradata
defines big data being a voluminous mix of structured and unstructured data
involving complex inter-relationships that do not lend themselves to analysis
with today's traditional techniques, making capturing, storing, managing and
analyzing it extremely difficult. The deal is part of the company's strategy to
target enterprises with big data analytics capabilities, and follows the
company's decision not only to buy into Aster Data - it purchased an 11 percent
stake in the company in September - but also buy database analytics vendor
Kickfire and bring its team aboard last August.
The
only question is what will happen to Aster Data's product line in the immediate
future, said Gartner analyst Mark Beyer, adding that it appears secure with an
improved research and development funding model due to Teradata's resources.
"Teradata
gains external files capability and MapReduce functionality which enables what
Gartner has called the logical or distributed data warehouse," said Mark Beyer,
an analyst at Gartner. "Gartner believes the logical or distributed data
warehouse will become the new leading edge architecture."
Scott
Gnau, chief development officer at Teradata, the company is not yet ready to
announce its product roadmap, but Teradata is working "cooperatively with (IBM)
BigInsights to bring MapReduce and Hadoop to customers."
The
deal is expected to close in the second quarter.
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