Microsoft has quietly acquired a startup called Metanautix, which offers a platform for running SQL-based queries across a variety of on-premise and cloud sources. Here's the lowdown from Microsoft's official blog post on the deal, for which terms were not disclosed:
Companies continue to generate enormous volumes of information and aspire to be more data-driven in their strategies and operations. But many struggle to bring together their various sources and siloes of data, and only analyze and use a fraction of all the available information.
With Metanautix technology, IT teams can connect a diversity of their company’s information across private and public clouds, without having to go through the costly and complex process of moving data into a centralized system. The solution can integrate data across traditional data warehouses like SQL Server, Oracle and Teradata; open source NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra; as well as business systems like Salesforce.com and wide array of other cloud and on-premises data stores.
Quest allows users to bring any types of data together in a table format, and scales to petabytes of data and thousands of servers, according to a promotional video the company released last year.
Microsoft plans to integrate Metanautix's Quest platform into SQL Server and Cortana, according to the post. It's otherwise keeping details of its plans—and apparently Quest itself—close to the vest, as all links on Metanautix's website now redirect to a page that points to a pair of blog posts announcing the deal.
Quest was inspired by Dremel, an internal tool developed at Google. Metanautix CEO Theo Vassilakis was one of Dremel's lead developers at Google, as Wired reported last year.
The Bottom Line
It made a good deal of sense for Microsoft to acquire Metanautix, says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. "This is an area where IBM, Oracle and Teradata have been stepping up, and Microsoft needs to keep pace with demand for flexible access to diverse data sources without the challenge and cost of data movement."
