Teradata Acquires Two Hadoop-Related Start-Ups

Analytics firm Teradata has acquired two US-based start-ups: Revelytix, which offers unique Hadoop metadata management technology, and Hadapt, which enables native integration of SQL and Hadoop.

The new capabilities will be built into the Teradata product range, and help the company create a more interoperable ‘system of systems’ for analytics.

“The addition of the key assets of these companies underscores Teradata’s commitment to continued innovation and customer value, extends our big data portfolio, and enhances the Teradata Unified Data Architecture,” commented Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs.

The exact price of the acquisitions has not been disclosed.

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For the first few years of its life, Revelytix was building data management software for the US Department of Defence. The founders and engineering team have been working at Metamatrix for eight years, before it was sold to Red Hat in 2006.

The new company was established at the same time as Hadoop was arriving to the scene, and Revelytix ended up creating Loom, a tool that automatically discovers datasets, generates metadata and tracks lineage of operations in Hadoop.

The start-up has been a Teradata partner for a while, also working with other famous names in big data, such as Cloudera and Hortonworks.

“They have some interesting tools for orchestrating the analytics of unstructured data, sometimes referred to as ‘data wrangling,’” Stephen Brobst, CTO at Teradata told TechWeek.

“The traditional way of doing things is you take ETL tools and you do transformation and homogenisation and put it in a nice construct and then you analyse it. That’s OK for data manufacturing, but if you’re doing data science, you need less structure and more agility. Revelytix is about agility.”

Meanwhile Hadapt was born at the Yale Computer Science department and developed the industry’s first big data analytics platform which natively integrated SQL with Hadoop. The company helps customers analyse structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data in a single platform.

“It’s essentially focused on access to data in a Hadoop environment through an easy-to-use interface,” Brobst said.

Along with Hadapt’s intellectual property, Teradata will also receive a team of highly experienced data scientists. Both acquisitions will become part of Teradata Labs, the award-winning R&D arm of the company.

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