Blog: Jill Dyche

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Jill Piles On: Microsoft Buys Datallegro and Zoomix

In which Jill speculates that Microsoft's next move is world domination. Oh, wait... Uh, nevermind.

In the past several months our friends at Microsoft have been on a veritable buying binge, but two acquisition deals have those of us in the BI community particularly engaged. Noteably, both acquisitions were made by Microsoft's SQL Server organization, not by the BI division, implying newfound focus on the "engine" behind the company's data warehousing and analytics solutions.

The acqusition of Zoomix, announced last week, had been widely-rumored. Zoomix had historically assumed various mantles including an MDM accelerator and a data quality tool, but is acknowledged in data quality circles as a self-learning, data-oriented rules engine. This not only fills what was heretofore a gaping hole in Microsoft's data quality story--the company had partnerships with almost all the well-known vendors including Group1 Software and Harte-Hanks' Trillium, which the company uses extensively in-house--but gives Microsoft an arguable leg-up when it comes to the smart transformation of data via its SSIS ETL tool.

Yesterday's acquistion of data warehouse appliance vendor DATAllegro was more of a surprise. The California company is best known in data warehouse circles as a "Teradata killer," because of its shared-nothing relational architecture and low price-point. The incongruity of Microsoft acquiring an open-source database vendor makes more sense when examined through the lens of extensibility. "The open-source part is no big deal for us," explains Donald Farmer, a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft. "We can strip that out fairly easily and replace it with our stuff. What this gives Microsoft is the scale-out piece of a relational engine."

Not to mention another focused development organization. Perhaps the biggest surprise of both acquisitions is the fact that Microsoft is keeping the two development teams largely in-place and intact. Zoomix engineers will continue to be based in Isreal as part of Microsoft's international SQL Server group, and DATAllegro's Aliso Viejo headquarters will become a Center of Excellence in the SQL Server development organization. What's next? The Pacific Rim? Oh, nevermind.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Microsoft Buys Zoomix, Microsoft Buys Datallegro, Donald Farmer

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