Teradata Buys Aster For ‘Big Data’ Credentials

Teradata has announced that it is acquiring Aster Data Systems for $263 million (£162 million), a move which has welcomed by analysts in light of the growing challenge of managing and analysing “big data”.

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 analysing it extremely difficult.

“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,” said Matt Aslett, an analyst with The 451 Group.

Data Analytics

“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,” Aslett explained.

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.”

Under Wraps

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.