Big Data News: Actian Acquires ParAccel

Here’s our review of some of this week’s noteworthy links for big data:

Actian acquires ParAccel.  Big data management company Actian announced it has acquired high-performance analytics company ParAccel. "ParAccel is being used by many of the world’s leading companies including Amazon, The Royal Bank of Scotland, OfficeMax and MicroStrategy to set them apart from their competition through analytics,” said Chuck Berger, CEO of ParAccel. “With Actian, they have immediate access to a broader portfolio of solutions to turn their data into value.” The acquisition furthers Actian's mission in building an innovative end-to-end database, integration and analytics solution. Joint customers of Actian and ParAccel already experience the value of the combined solution set. “As a provider of right-time business intelligence as a service to innovative automotive manufacturers and dealerships, Autometrics aggregates data from 150 sites totaling millions of records per day, which must be deduplicated, loaded, analyzed and validated in shorter and shorter timeframes to drive clients’ critical business decisions,” said Stephen Shaw, Autometrics’ CEO. “With the myriad of data integration capabilities from Actian and the ParAccel Analytic Database, we are able to give automotive manufacturers rapid measures of lower funnel demand to optimize their marketing initiatives, sales incentives and inventory management.”

Teradata launches SAS Analytics Model 720.  At the SAS Global Forum 2013 Teradata (TDC) announced the availability of the Teradata Appliance for SAS High-Performance Analytics Model 720. The appliance was designed with SAS and supports the newly announced SAS High-Performance Analytics offerings and SAS Visual Analytics. SAS Visual Analytics on Teradata quickly uncovers patterns and trends from massive volumes of data and presents these insights rapidly in graphical form throughout the enterprise, including via mobile devices. The speed and integration offered by the Teradata 720 Appliance results from its seamless integration of in-memory analytics within the Teradata warehouse environment. “I find the extreme performance of the Teradata 720 for SAS exciting, and believe it opens many new opportunities for companies on the cutting edge, improving data governance and unifying data and analytics in an integrated environment,” said Manuel Sevilla, Chief Technology Officer for Business Information Management at Capgemini. “In addition, the pairing of SAS and Teradata is a great value proposition for faster time-to-value while reducing the latency from the capture and provision of new data to the output of analytic intelligence.” Teradata also recently announced large data warehouse customer wins from the largest local bank in Southwest China, and the Bank of Ningbo in China.

Qubole closes Series A funding.  Quobole announced the completion of a Series A funding round. This brings the total investment to $7 million from Charles River Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures as well as angel investment from Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaram. Based on Hadoop and founded by the creators of Apache Hive and Facebook's analytics platform, Quobole Data Service is heavily optimized for the Cloud and is focused on making analytics easy and accessible to businesses of all sizes. Its data engine takes data from multiple sources - on premise, cloud structured and unstructured - and provides instant access through analytic tools like Tableau, Excel and R. Additionally, its self-service user interface and the library of connectors to SQL sources, NoSQL sources, and MPP platforms make it easy for analysts and data teams to combine, correlate, and create actionable insights from their data sets. "We have reached a critical poitn where our model has been validated by customers and investors alike," said Quoble CEO Ashish Thusoo. "A half petabyte of data processed demonstrates Quobole's growth and viability and we are very excited to raise the bar again as we continue to innovate on behalf of our users."