Microsoft Acquires Big Data Silo-Breaker -- Redmond Snaps Up Startup Metanautix

Microsoft did a little last minute Christmas shopping just before the weekend and bought itself a shiny new data compute engine in the shape of Metanautix. Pronounced ‘meta-naugt-ix’ Redmond’s latest toy is no toy… the firm is a data management for business analytics company -- but what does that really mean?

Metanautix Quest is a technology that claims to positively embrace data silos -- the distinct ‘grain hoppers’ of different types of data that a business ends up creating in disconnected databases.

• One data silo might hold email & communications,
• One might hold financial transactions,
• Another might hold video or images
• … and yet another might hold social media data and so on.

How it works

When firms want to perform big data analysis upon their whole silo collection (so to speak) they will normally have to move that data into a centralized system first before they can exert big data analytics upon it. Metanautix is meant to be a more efficient means of bringing structured, unstructured and semi-structured data together by ‘combing’ it and then ‘corralling’ it for analytics. The company calls this action the creation of a ‘data supply chain’ and the technology is capable of bringing together lots of different data regardless of type, size or location.

Key to the intelligence engineered into Metanautix is this technology’s ability to make a wide variety of data query-able by SQL, the most widely used data query language - at speed and high scale.

The official blog from corp VP of Microsoft's Data Group Joseph Sirosh reads as follows, “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.”

Co-founder and CEO of Metanautix Theo Vassilakis is on the record in relation to the news explaining that his firm started out with the vision to integrate the data supply chain by building its Quest data compute engine. Amusingly enough, he doesn’t appear too sure about whether he is joining forces or being swallowed.

“I am excited to announce that Metanautix has been acquired by Microsoft,” blogged Vassilakis. “Three years in, we can take this work to the next level by joining forces with Microsoft. We look forward to being part of Microsoft’s important efforts with Azure and SQL Server to give enterprise customers a unified view of all of their data across cloud and on-premises systems.”

Fold in, then gently bake until golden

Microsoft now intends to ‘fold in’ Metanautix into its own wider and total data platform proposition -- so this means the Metanautix engine will become part of SQL Server and the Cortana Analytics Suite. It’s what Redmond likes to call its ‘ambition to build the intelligent cloud’ today.

As marketing-cheesy as this may sound, if we say that the opposite is the ‘dumb data warehouse’, then we can see why the cloud needs extra perspicacity, sagacity and perception.