VMware on Tuesday announced its acquisition of Cetas Software, an 18-month old Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup that develops big data analytics technology. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
Cetas, in its company backgrounder, says its flagship Instant Intelligence technology identifies patterns in "live big data streams and stored application data." This is something that relational databases can't do, and it helps organizations make sense of the mountains of unstructured data their users are generating every day.
Cetas' expertise extends to online analytics applications, IT operations analytics and enterprise big data. The company offers its flagship Instant Intelligence product as an on-premise analytics application on top of Hadoop, an open source technology for handling big data, or as a cloud service.
VMware, which sees big data as an enabling technology for cloud computing, plans to continue investing in Cetas, Richard McDougall, CTO of application infrastructure at VMware, said in a blog post.
"The Cetas team has been driving the democratization of analytics and business intelligence by dramatically lowering the barriers to entry for all companies, from small businesses to large enterprises," said McDougall.
Chuck Hollis, CTO and vice President of global marketing at EMC, is similarly enamored of the Cetas acquisition and explained why in a separate blog post. "In one sense, Cetas virtualizes big data analytics. They help make predictive analytics easier to consume and easier to produce," he said.
Big Data is red hot at the moment, as evidenced last week by the successful IPO of Splunk, a San Francisco-based startup whose shares doubled in their first day of trading, as well as by the number of Hadoop based startups looking to capitalize on the trend continues to grow.
