Microsoft buys DATAllegro

Microsoft on Thursday said that it will acquire DATAllegro, which makes data warehouse appliances.

The purchase is expected to "extend the capabilities of Microsoft's mission critical platform," according to a statement. DATAllegro will ride shotgun with other software to manage data and give the software giant one more thing to sell to the enterprise.

DATAllegro specializes in large-volume, high-performance data warehouses and counts customers in the retail, telecommunications and manufacturing industries. DATAllegro's hardware is non proprietary and is built on Dell, Bull and EMC systems.

Amid all of the chatter about Microsoft's Yahoo bid and Windows the fact remains that the company's enterprise business is on a roll. In a memo, CEO Steve Ballmer said:

Our enterprise and server business has never been stronger--today we are on the verge of becoming the number one enterprise software company. We need to continue to push on all fronts--mail with Exchange, business intelligence with PerformancePoint, virtualization with Hyper-V, and databases with SQL Server. We have to drive our enterprise search capabilities, our unified communications solutions, and our collaboration technologies. And we must continue to compete against Linux in key workloads such as Web servers and high performance computing.

The purchase of DATAllegro fits into those enterprise goals. Microsoft plans to bundle SQL, business intelligence and data warehousing along with the DATAllegro technology.