Teradata to Acquire Aster Data, Expand into Emerging Big Data Market

Teradata has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aster Data Systems, a pioneer in advanced analytics and the management of a variety of diverse data that is not structured. The combination of Teradata and Aster Data technologies is expected to enable businesses to unlock the new intelligence hidden within the ever-growing volume of big data.

“We are excited about the big data analytics market opportunity that Aster Data brings to Teradata. This, coupled with our recent Integrated Marketing Management acquisition with Aprimo, and our increased investments into our core data warehouse business, provide three best-in-class platforms to fuel future growth for Teradata,” said Mike Koehler, president and chief executive officer of Teradata.

“Teradata is recognized as an innovator and leader in data warehousing, and the addition of Aster Data will enable us to leapfrog into a leadership position in the emerging big data market. This is a great opportunity and something our customers have been asking for,” said Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata. “I am very pleased to welcome Aster Data’s talented employees to Teradata, when the transaction is completed, and to leverage Aster Data’s sophisticated analytics and innovative processing of big data.”

In this emerging market, big data is generally defined as being massive in volume with a mix of structured and unstructured data involving complex interrelationships that do not lend themselves to analysis with today’s traditional techniques. For these reasons, capturing, storing, managing and analyzing it is extremely difficult. Some of the new sources of diverse, non-relational data include: Web applications, sensor networks, social networks, genomics, video and photographs.

According to a recent Gartner news release, “2011 will be the year when data warehousing reaches what could well be its most-significant inflection point since its inception. Gartner firmly believes that the data warehouse ‘ideal’ is changing and will give way to new kind of warehouse that addresses more extreme types of information assets. As a result, data warehouse database management system (DBMS) vendors must begin to address numerous, new information asset formats, or be relegated to supporting roles in the future.” “In fact, we believe through 2015, organizations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20 percent.”

Teradata is a 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.

“We are excited to be a part of Teradata. Working together, we can accelerate the ability of customers to harness the large volumes of diverse data that corporations must deal with and analyze,” said Tasso Argyros, chief technology officer and co-founder, Aster Data.

“We are bringing a new class of data-driven applications that leverage the power of the patent-pending SQL-MapReduce analytics and innovations related to non-relational data processing delivered with flexible and easy-to-use tools,” said Mayank Bawa, chief customer officer and co-founder, Aster Data. “We are really excited about the prospect for growth as we join forces with Teradata to bring Aster Data’s solutions to customers worldwide.”

Teradata is acquiring Aster Data’s business, including its intellectual property and technology product line, through a merger transaction. Teradata plans to support Aster Data’s customers and integrate its employees immediately upon completion of the acquisition, which is expected to occur in the second quarter of 2011. Teradata acquired an 11 percent ownership interest in Aster Data in September 2010, and has agreed to pay an additional $263 million for the remaining ownership interest, net of debt and other expenses. In addition, through this acquisition, Teradata will obtain approximately $21 million of cash which Aster Data is expected to have on its balance sheet at closing.