A few months after indicating it was ready to buy its way into analytics, Netezza has inked its first deal as part of the initiative. The company said last Thursday that it will pay $6.4m for NuTech Solutions. It’s largely an HR move, with Netezza picking up 30 scientists and engineers from the startup. The addition should help Netezza as it looks to run different types of complex analytics inside Netezza Performance Server, rather than just enlist help from partners – including vendors, academic institutions, developers and consultancies – through its existing Netezza Developer Network.
Rival data-warehousing vendors are also looking to add more smarts to their boxes. So far, however, that hasn’t meant much shopping. For instance, Teradata and SAS Institute cozied up and unveiled a joint roadmap last October involving integrating various SAS wares, including its analytics and data-mining algorithms, into the Teradata database. (Netezza also has partnerships with SAS and rival predictive analytics vendor SPSS.) Meanwhile, Greenplum also announced support for embedded analytics in the latest release of its warehouse, G3.
We wonder if the NuTech deal – Netezza’s first acquisition – is a bit of an appetizer ahead of a larger bite of the analytics market. We’ve highlighted a couple of tasty targets for Netezza, including existing partner Manthan Systems, which focuses solely on the retail industry, or KXEN, which would fit well with Netezza’s mission to expand the scope of its query technology. With its treasury stuffed with cash from its recent IPO, Netezza certainly has the resources to do the deals.
Selected data warehousing-analytics transactions
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