Mar 8, 2019

Analytics software consolidation continues TIBCO Software has bought SnappyData, an in-memory data platform service powered by Apache Spark and Apache Geode, for an undisclosed sum. SnappyData’s team is know for building Geode, a distributed data management platform used on Wall Street trading platforms. They sold a managed Geode provider, GemFire, to VMware in 2010. It is now owned by Pivotal. The deal, announced Thursday, is the latest sign of industry consolidation in the data analytics sector, amid growing demand for effective data science tools. SnappyData’s CTO Jags Ramnarayan describes the company’s mission as to “simplify the overly complex big data architectures we see today, created by stitching together batch oriented (Hadoop, MPP databases) and real-time products (operational databases like MongoDB, HBase, Cassandra, messaging like Kafka, and point streaming solutions).” “We reduce this complexity by fusing Spark with a hybrid in-memory database capable of both analytic and real time workloads, creating a single unified platform. Spark is a data processing engine that can do extract, transform and load, analytics, machine learning and graph processing on large volumes of data at rest (batch processing) or in motion (streaming processing). Geode is a data management platform that pools memory, CPU and network resources to manage application objects and behavior. It was first deployed as a low-latency data engine on Wall Street. Reflecting on the sale,  Ramnarayan said in a blog: “Our journey started with  GemFire , an in-memory data grid targeting enterprises… looking to build a new generation of sub-second transactional systems that could scale to 1000s of users.” (VMWare acquired GemFire in 2010.) He added: “Years of customer experiences with GemFire led us to new big data opportunities… focused on the benefits of in-memory performance, scale-out, real-time updates and access to ever increasing amounts of data.” “As we started to work with customers, we soon realized that customers had to deal with complex architectures – a range of Hadoop products, streaming, in-memory technology like GemFire and MPP databases.” “Apache Spark was in its infancy but was quite appealing as a general purpose distributed computational framework for big data. We experimented on the amalgamation of Spark with our in-memory technology, validating our ideas with Pivotal customers and decided to launch SnappyData as a independent company”. Matt Quinn, chief operating officer, TIBCO, said the acquisition will make “TIBCO Connected Intelligence platform one of the best solutions for driving real-time insights, such as predictive maintenance, anomaly detection, and more.” Adding SnappyData’s portolio to TIBCO’s offering enables it to enhance existing offerings, such as visual analytics (Apache Spark with better data refresh intervals, faster query times, and increased productivity); streaming analytics and DataOps (orchestrating and streamlining management of analytics data pipelines) it said.