May 29, 2012 BIG DATA ANALYTICS M&A

In our first quarter Information Industry press release, we emphasized the market need for software solutions that are capable of deconstructing large amounts of data from the web. The press release mentioned Connotate’s acquisition of Fetch Technologies, which will result in a merger between the two companies, as a pertinent example.

Big data analytics is a fast growing segment. In the accompanying trend report, Berkery Noyes noted a 53 percent quarterly increase in M&A activity for companies involved in one of the following categories: data management, web analytics, and business intelligence.

As expected, there were several interesting big data deals in April as well. IBM acquired Vivisimo last month, a provider of software that automates data discovery. IBM is no stranger to M&A in this space, having acquired i2 Limited in 2011 and Coremetrics and Datacap in 2010. 

In addition, VMware acquired Cetas Software, which offers big data analytics solutions to online enterprises. VMWare has stated that it sees big data and predictive intelligence systems that can handle hundreds of terabytes as an important component of cloud computing.

Companies in the Media and Marketing Industry are also making strategic big data acquisitions. For instance, W2O Group acquired Ravel to enhance its analytics abilities. Ravel, a startup founded in 2010, allows businesses to gain insight from large datasets. One of Ravel’s offerings is an open source graph database called GoldenOrb, a cloud-based project modeled after Hadoop as well as Google’s Pregel system.