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Teradata acquires Aster Data to shore up analytics portfolio

The acquisitions support Teradata's transition from old-world datawarehouse vendor to "big data" provider, with services in the cloud that promise, faster, more relevant data retrieval.
Written by John Hazard, Contributor

Teradata today agreed to buy Aster Data Systems as the data warehouse vendor moves to beef up its storage management portfolio and big data in the cloud.

TeraData will pay $263 million to acquire Aster Data, which makes analytics software that handles large sets of structured and unstructured data, the second such acquisition for Teradata in as many month. It acquired Aprimo for $50 million in January.

The acquisitions support Teradata's transition from old-world datawarehouse vendor to "big data" provider, with services in the cloud that promise, faster, more relevant data retrieval.

Teradata's announcement of the deal focused on Aster's ability manage "a variety of diverse data that is not structured," such as web applications, sensor networks, social networks, genomics, video and photographs.

Teradata is the long-recognized data warehouse leader, and Aster Data excels at deriving value from new types of data with new analytics capabilities such as graph analysis.  In addition, this diverse and unstructured data can be integrated with structured data in data warehouses for deeper business insight. This will dramatically expand the ability of companies to leverage the massive volumes of all of their data to drive profitable growth.

In other words, Aster Data and Aprimo offer Teradata a chance to cope with the data they warehouse, as TechCrunch explained in a September report on Aster Data.

Aster Data makes products that help manage and analyze very large sets of data, solving problems that standard databases may not be able to cope with. One of Aster's core products is nCluster, which the company describes as a massively parallel (MPP) database with an analytics engine baked in. Aster Data's clients include comScore, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

The deal is part of an arms race among storage vendors moving to dominate Big Data including Dell, HP IBM, Oracle and Teradata, reports Reuters.

There had been a slew of deals in the data storage industry following the bidding war between Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell Inc over data storage company 3PAR Inc .

Later, IBM joined the deal-making frenzy by buying data analytics company Netezza Corp for $1.7 billion in September.

Following the acquisition of Teradata's rivals, there had been speculation that the company could the be next target.

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