View all newsletters
Receive our newsletter - data, insights and analysis delivered to you
  1. Technology
September 19, 2014

Top 10 mergers and acquisition in the Big Data space 2014

The big data market is seeing vibrant activity.

By Amy-Jo Crowley

Oracle & BlueKai

Oracle bought marketing tech startup BlueKai for about $400m in February.

BlueKai offers a data management system that allows marketers to personalise marketing campaigns and measure how well their campaigns reach certain types of people.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although multiple media outlets put the deal at around $400m.

The software giant is integrating BlueKai with its acquired companies Eloqua, a marketing firm, and email marketing specialist Responsys.

Salesforce & RelateIQ

The business software company paid up to $390m to acquire Palo Alto-based RelateIQ, in a deal that will close in October.

RelateIQ, which will become a Salesforce subsidiary, uses a ‘relationship intelligence’ platform to automatically capture data from email, calendars and smartphone calls to provide users with insights into their working lives in real-time.

RelateIQ, founded in 2011, managed to raise $69m in venture capital, with $40m in Series C finalised just this March.

Content from our partners
How businesses can safeguard themselves on the cyber frontline
How hackers’ tactics are evolving in an increasingly complex landscape
Green for go: Transforming trade in the UK

The acquisition is less than the $2.5bn Salesforce paid for online market ExactTarget in 2013 and more than the $326m Salesforce paid for social media monitoring company Radian6 Technologies in 2011.

TIBCO & Jaspersoft

TIBCO paid $185m to acquire Jaspersoft, which is best known for its low-cost open source ETL and reporter software, in April.

The deal is expected to build up Tibco’s analytics business portfolio that until now only consisted of TIBCO Spotfire analytics product, which provides data-discovery tools.

Jaspersoft uses a commercial open source business model that allows developers to embed reporting, analytics and dashboards into applications via multiple data sources.

There have been some 16 million downloads of Jaspersoft’s software and more than 140,000 production deployments as well as 2,000 commercial customers.

Cloudera & Gazzang

The Hadoop vendor agreed to buy data security company Gazzang for an undisclosed amount in June.

The acquisition will see Cloudera incorporate the startup’s encryption software into its Apache Hadoop system in efforts to address the challenges of processing sensitive and legally protected data within the Hadoop ecosystem.

"We did not have that as part of the platform and our way for solving that was to go and work with Gazzang and a number of other vendors, who specialise in doing that," Cloudera’s CTO and founder Amr Awadallah told CBR in an interview recently.

"Every time, we had to do that with a new customer, they had to sign a deal with us and customers kept telling us we need to have encryption as part of our platform."

The deal follows Cloudera’s launch lasts year of Sentry, a security module that aims to manage user access rights to specific data sets within a given database.

Hortonworks & XA Secure

Fellow Hadoop vendor Hortonworks also struck a deal to acquire startup XA Secure to make its big data software safe enough for companies to use.

Hortonworks said it plans to use the security firm’s security capabilities, such as centralised policy management, fine-grain access control and encryption management, on its Apache Hadoop stack.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Hortonworks said XA Secure’s 10 employees have joined Hortonworks.

Teradata & Think Big Analytics

Teradata agreed to buy consulting firm Think Big Analytics in September, marking the data warehouse firm’s third acquisition of a company specialising in big data within six weeks.

The company, which has over 5,000 workers, said it plans to integrate Think Big Analytics’ consulting practice, which offers big data services, assessments, planning and architecture mapping, with its own big data consulting outfit in the Americas.

"Teradata and Think Big share an empowering vision to help customers leverage new, open source technologies to complement existing proven technologies, which drive analytic value from a rich diversity of data sets," said Ron Bodkin, founder and CEO of Think Big.

The deal comes after Teradata bought assets from metadata management startup Revelytix and Hadapt in late July.

Google & Rangespan

Google bought the Rangespan in May, marking the Internet giant’s third acquisition of a UK start-up this year after Al-Specialist DeepMind and Spider.io, an anti-malware firm.

Rangespan, founded in 2011 in London City by former Amazon employees, had previously helped retailers use real-time sales data to better predict which products will be popular with customers and manage supply chains.

Google said the deal will help it expand its Google Shopping web portal and e-commerce business.

"As part of the change, we will wind down Rangespan’s services. We’ve already begun working individually with each of our retailers and suppliers on this process," Rangespan said on its website.

The terms of the purchase were not disclosed.

IBM & Cloudant

IBM acquired the database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider for an undisclosed sum to strengthen its big data, cloud computing and mobile services.

Cloudant helps developers to quickly create mobile and web apps with clients including gaming, financial services, mobile device manufacturers, online learning, retail and healthcare.

The technology is expected to boost IBM’s cloud computing services by allowing developers to build, test, deploy and scale cloud apps on a variety of hosting layers.

Microsoft & Capptain

The software giant bought a French mobile analytics startup in a move to enhance its mobile offerings to businesses.

Founded six years ago, Capptain offers real-time mobile app analytics and the ability to send push notifications to users based on this data in real time.

This helps enterprises to monitor and react more efficiently to customer problems and provide relevant offers and notifications rather than junk mail, according to Capptain.

Microsoft said it is integrating Capptain’s software with its Microsoft Azure suite of services to allow firms to build maps that can engage with customers and employees, and analyse their use and improve engagement.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Twitter & Namo Media

Twitter acquired the native ads technology firm less than a year after it purchased MoPub, another mobile advertising platform.

The terms of the acquisition deal were not revealed by the two parties but a source privy to the matter told the Wall Street Journal that it is worth less than $100m.

Namo Media, in a blogpost, had said that through its conversations with the MoPub team at Twitter it has realised that "they would be able to create better solutions together".

 

Websites in our network
Select and enter your corporate email address Tech Monitor's research, insight and analysis examines the frontiers of digital transformation to help tech leaders navigate the future. Our Changelog newsletter delivers our best work to your inbox every week.
  • CIO
  • CTO
  • CISO
  • CSO
  • CFO
  • CDO
  • CEO
  • Architect Founder
  • MD
  • Director
  • Manager
  • Other
Visit our privacy policy for more information about our services, how New Statesman Media Group may use, process and share your personal data, including information on your rights in respect of your personal data and how you can unsubscribe from future marketing communications. Our services are intended for corporate subscribers and you warrant that the email address submitted is your corporate email address.
THANK YOU