We are very excited to share with you that today we announced our company, Aster Data, is being acquired by Teradata, who as you all know commands the #1 position in data warehousing. Together, we will tackle the massive opportunity in the big data and big data analytics market. Upon close, Aster Data will become part of the Teradata organization and our products will become part of the Teradata family of products, sold stand-alone, and integrated into their product line.
The combined goal is big, as said on Teradata’s web site home page:
We are very excited to share with you that today we announced our company, Aster Data, is being acquired by Teradata, who as you all know commands the #1 position in data warehousing. Together, we will tackle the massive opportunity in the big data and big data analytics market. Upon close, Aster Data will become part of the Teradata organization and our products will become part of the Teradata family of products, sold stand-alone, and integrated into their product line.
The combined goal is big, as said on Teradata’s web site home page:
Today marks a major milestone in our continuing journey, and we are thrilled to join forces with the market leader in data management. Our company has achieved a lot since our inception just 5 years ago, and we look forward to accelerating our innovation and market reach even further – with the market strength of Teradata and the speed of our combined cultures. In 5 years, we’ve played a big role in shaping the Big Data Analytics Platform market and innovated on new technologies that enable customers to store diverse, granular data and process it in diverse ways. The big data opportunity as we see it is more about extracting insights from your diverse data than just finding cost-effective ways to store it. Processing and extracting deep insights from diverse and big data is where we’ve innovated and broken new ground, and with this merger we will accelerate it further.
Our journey started when we realized that (a) it was hard and expensive to manage big data, and (b) it was nearly impossible to process and analyze diverse (non-relational) data types like Web clicks, social connections, and text files at scale. The two worlds of data management and data processing were separate – RDBMSs would store and manage data in their world; however, applications and tools would do analytics outside of the database. This division severely restricted the types of analytics possible on large amounts of data. We discussed this in more detail on an earlier blog post from January 26.
The real impact of the above two restrictions was that organizations were drawing in a flood of data and couldn’t make any sense out of it. For instance, organizations couldn’t analyze enough data to understand their customers at an individual level, and thus they couldn’t improve their products and customer experience. Or, they couldn’t detect advanced fraud schemes because the offenders were hiding in terabytes of data (the outliers) and complicated money network schemes, resulting in huge losses.
Foreseeing this opportunity, we decided to change the enterprise data infrastructure and build a platform that (a) uses commodity hardware to scale at unprecedented levels while keeping costs low, (b) combines data management and data processing in one platform to allow much deeper analysis of data at much larger scale, and (c) accommodates the processing of diverse data types (e.g. machine generated data, social network data, text data, etc.) in a single platform.
Over the past 5 years we have been aggressively building our technology and developing this big new market. We’ve had continuous and increasing success – one recognition of this was Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant. And looking forward, we were seeing a 2011 where the new market we were creating would become mainstream reality across organizations. As a Gartner press release recently stated: “2011 will be the year when data warehousing reaches what could well be its most-significant inflection point since its inception… The biggest, and possibly most-elaborate data management system in the IT house is changing. The new data warehouse will introduce new scope for flexibility in adding new information types and change detection.”
And this execution now sets the stage for our joining forces with Teradata. We love this merger for 3 reasons:
- First, we love that Teradata is by far the most successful data warehousing and data-driven applications company in the world. As founders, we understood that Teradata will accelerate our vision and will back us in realizing the full potential of the Big Data Analytics Platform.
- Second, we have always had a big and ambitious technology vision. A bold vision needs time and resources to execute to its full potential. As part of Teradata, we will have the resources and support needed to accelerate our technology. We will also have access to a global sales organization and channel to accelerate the adoption of the Big Data Analytics Platform, and ultimately bring more benefits to our customers, more quickly.
- Third, Aster Data nCluster is very complementary to Teradata’s existing product portfolio. By combining products from both companies, we can come to market with solutions that solve a very wide range of diverse data management and data analysis problems using “best of breed” components. We expect both Aster Data and Teradata customers to find our joint offerings very unique and valuable for their business, thus increasing their opportunities and decreasing their costs.
In closing, we want to re-iterate that we have never been more excited about our market, our company and our opportunity! Our vision has proven to be right early on and we’ve watch other players in our market try to follow suit – that’s just one external validation of our direction, and there have been many more as our customers use our products to break new ground in analytics insights on diverse and big data. As we innovated and as we delivered on the vision for big and diverse data management, our team’s execution has truly defined and helped shape the market. And in this evolution, we are more confident and tremendously excited as we write the next chapter of this market.
Upon close of this transaction, the merger with Teradata is about taking our products, our innovations, our IP, and the Aster Data team, and accelerating our lead in the big data and big data analytics market. Or simply put it’s about ‘going big.’
We really want to thank our customers that believed in us and drove key input into our product roadmap and see the big data opportunity. We promise that our commitment and support to you all will only increase in the future. Also our team, who joined a small company and have worked hard to make it so successful. And finally, our investors who understood the opportunity and believed they were going to be part of something new, valuable and exciting.
For more information on today’s announcement read the full press release at www.asterdata.com and also visit Teradata’s web site www.teradata.com
– Mayank Bawa & Tasso Argyros
