“Companies continue to generate enormous volumes of information and aspire to be more data-driven in their strategies and operations,” Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s Data Group, said in a blog post.
However, many companies struggle to bring together their various sources and siloes of data, and they only analyze and use a fraction of all the available information, he said. "Metanautix’ technology breaks these boundaries to connect the 'data supply chain,' no matter what the type, size or location of an organization’s data,” Sirosh added.
SQL Access to Any Data Type
Metanautix’s main product is its Quest data compute engine. The engine provides scalable SQL access to any type of data an enterprise might have, and allows users to run ad-hoc SQL queries. That capability is particularly important for large companies that want to combine and collate data from different departments and data silos, oftentimes stored in different formats.
Normally, a company would have to transfer all the data from its existing siloes into a single, central repository using a common format. That can be a non-starter for companies with too much data because they are unable to transfer that data in a cost-effective manner. As a result, many companies are only able to analyze a fraction of their overall data, Microsoft said.
Metanautix’s Quest engine can integrate data across traditional data warehouses like SQL Server, Oracle and Teradata; open source NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra; as well as business systems such as Salesforce and a wide array of other cloud and on-premises data stores.
Building the Intelligent Cloud
Quest also allows organizations to connect data from across private and public cloud deployments. One of its primary advantages is that its user interface remains exactly the same regardless of whether the engine is querying data in the cloud, on-premises data center, or desktop, according to Metanautix.
Sirosh said that Metanautix’s technology will be integrated into Microsoft’s existing SQL Server and the Cortana Analytics Suite products. “It is another important part of our ongoing efforts to build the intelligent cloud and help our customers fully realize the value of their data,” he said.
Theo Vassilakis, Metanautix’s co-founder and CEO, said that the company would also be integrated into Microsoft’s efforts with its Azure cloud services.
Many of Microsoft’s most recent acquisitions have been focused on building out its service offerings for the “intelligent cloud.” CEO Satya Nadella identified the intelligent cloud as one of the company's three main investment priorities. Indeed, Microsoft has made a number of acquisitions of cloud companies in 2015. Terms of the Metanautix acquisition were not disclosed.