SAP confirms Altiscale acquisition

SAP on Tuesday confirmed that it has acquired big data startup Altiscale. The deal was initially reported in August, but SAP would neither confirm nor deny that it had bought the four-year-old, Palo Alto-based startup until today.

In a press release, SAP says that it plans to integrate Altiscale's Big Data-as-a-Service (BDaaS) platform across the SAP portfolio. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but SAP did say that the acquisition is now closed, and that going forward, Altiscale will operate as a focused BDaaS offering from SAP.

Altiscale specializes in cloud-based Hadoop and Spark services and competes with the likes of Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Microsoft HDInight, and Google Cloud Dataproc.

By acquiring Altiscale, SAP will have the capacity to deliver high-scale data services while reducing the need for customers to seek out third-party vendors. SAP also sees Altiscale as complementary to a bevy of strategic initiatives, including the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, IoT, analytics, LoB cloud apps, and business networks.

"Altiscale is a natural fit for SAP, as we share our overall focus of helping enterprises derive business value from data and successfully leverage Big Data," SAP said in the announcement. "Since Altiscale is a leader in Big Data-as-a-Service based on Hadoop and Spark, it enables SAP to drive end-to-end value in Big Data across the technology, data platform, PaaS, analytics, and application stack."

Altiscale co-founder and CEO Raymie Stata noted in a blog post that in addition to becoming a new business unit within SAP, Altiscale will work across SAP's family of companies to drive data and platform strategy.