Microsoft has bought Californian start up Metanautix for an undisclosed fee in a bid to improve the flow of analytics data as part of its ‘intelligent cloud’ strategy.
The Palo Alto vendor was launched by Theo Vassilakis and Toli Lerios in 2014 with $7 million. The Google and Facebook veterans had impressed venture capitalists with their plans for more penetrative analysis of disparate data. The strategy was to integrate the data supply chains of enterprises by building a data computing engine, Quest, that created scalable SQL access to any data.
Modern corporations aspire to data-driven strategies but have far too much information to deal with, according to Metanautix. With so many sources of data, only a fraction can be analysed, often because too many information silos are impervious to query tools.
Metanautix uses SQL, the most popular query language, to interrogate sources as diverse as data warehouses, open source data base, business systems and in-house/on-premise systems. The upshot is that all data is equally accessible, whether it’s from Salesforce or SQL Server, Teradata or MongoDB.
“As someone who has led complex, large scale data warehousing projects myself, I am excited about building the intelligent cloud and helping to realize the full value of data,” said Joseph Sirosh, corporate VP of Microsoft’s Data Group, announcing the take-over on the company web site.
Metanautix’s technology, which promises to connect to all data regardless of type, size or location, will no longer be available as a branded product or service. Microsoft is to initially integrate it within its SQL Server and Cortana Analytics systems with details of integration with the rest of Microsoft’s service portfolio to be announced in later months, Sirosh said.
The blog posting from Metanautix CEO Theo Vassilakis hinted at further developments. “We look forward to being part of Microsoft’s important efforts with Azure and SQL Server to give enterprise customers a unified view of all of their data across cloud and on-premises systems,” he said.