Hitachi Vantara To Use Waterline Acquisition For Intelligent Data Management

Data management and analytics technology developer Hitachi Vantara Wednesday said it plans to acquire Waterline Data, a startup developer of intelligent data cataloging technology.

With the acquisition, Waterline Data's unique data cataloging technology will be integrated with Hitachi Vantara's data operations technology to automate management of data across all of a business' data sets, said Lothar Schubert, head of product marketing for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Hitachi Vantara.

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Waterline Data will bring to Hitachi Vantara strong and differentiated capabilities in data cataloging, particularly to Hitachi Vantara's Lumada big data and IoT platform and its Pentaho data management and analytics platform, Schubert told CRN.

"It provides common metadata for our Lumada portfolio and extends and differentiates our data operations," he said.

Waterline Data has developed its own intellectual property it calls Data Fingerprinting that helps with the automation, discovery and classification of data, Schubert said.

"Waterline Data uses a combination of AI and rules-based systems to identify data," he said. "It crawls data and learns its metadata. So it can see if data is an insurance claim, a Social Security number, or a customer's data. And it can catalog data across terabytes of capacity. It helps in discovering, tagging and managing data, which is a big deal in GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act."

Waterline Data is a startup, but already has products and an existing customer base, Schubert said. "So it's a proven technology already," he said.

The company's technology integrates with most standard and open-source databases, hyperscaler and data warehousing technologies, Schubert said.

"Customers tend to be heterogeneous in their data technology," he said. "They need to connect across a heterogeneous infrastructure."

Hitachi Vantara plans to continue making Waterline Data's technology available as a stand-alone offering while working to integrate that technology into its Lumada and Pentaho platforms, Schubert said. "We will leave no customer behind," he said.

Schubert declined to talk about Waterline Data's size or the financial terms of the acquisition.