WANdisco who flagged up its interest in the big data space recently has made its first acquisition in the area, courtesy of the $5.1m share-heavy purchase of privately-held California-based AltoStor.
Sheffield-based WANdisco flagged up its big data investment plans when it announced its H1 results (see WANdisco accelerates investment plans). The deal looks positive on several counts. It is gaining IP and skills and the skills base could be the real value point – AltoStor founders Dr. Konstantin and Jagane Sundar were founding developers of Apache Hadoop while at Yahoo, are on-going contributors, and Shvachko implemented Hadoop at eBay. They have practical as well theoretical big data experience and there will not be too many others with this type and level of experience.
With AltoStor and the two founders in-house WANdisco says its big data plans will be accelerated and it expects to bring its first big data products to market in Q1, earlier than expected. It looks like AltoStor was planning a release of its own and this will roll out, but further a Q1 release is also on the cards as WANdisco’s active-active replication technology is combined with Hadoop’s high availability capabilities. The precise nature of the products have not been revealed but it won’t be too long a wait by the sounds of things.
WANdisco is small player in a market that the global providers are putting intense efforts into so it risks being overwhelmed. But this is a savvy acquisition and there is also the consideration that there are no ‘incumbents’ in the big data space.