Pivotal Buys Startup Quickstep to Accelerate Enterprise Analytics

To boost its enterprise analytics capabilities and drive a new query execution framework, EMC's Pivotal has acquired Quickstep Technologies, a University of Wisconsin Big Data startup led by Jignesh Patel.

Key members of the Quickstep team, including Patel, will join Pivotal, as the technology is integrated into Pivotal HAWQ and Pivotal Greenplum Database. Earlier this year Pivotal made its entire suite of enterprise analytics tools open source.

Pivotal expects the improvement in SQL query execution performance in its Big Data suite will target an order of magnitude acceleration for business intelligence, ad-hoc queries, analytics, and data science workloads. In a Pivotal blog post Patel notes that the data processing engine will run efficiently on modern hardware with multi-core processors, large main memories, and newer non-volatile memory technologies.

Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, Quickstep developed a relational data processing engine that incorporates what it calls Bitweaving, which it says allows software to exploit and be in lock-step with advances in hardware utilization and optimization.

Patel is a Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has started and sold two other companies, including mobile data analytics provider Locomatix, which was acquired by Twitter.

Patels says that with the Quickstep project the company has "rethought from the ground up the algorithms that make up the DNA of data platforms so that the platform can deliver unprecedented speed for data analytics. It is time to move our ideas from research to actual products. There is no better home for this technology than at Pivotal given Pivotal’s formidable track record in delivering real value to their customers in Big Data."

Pivotal says that along with this acquisition it has also licensed technology from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.