What Happened?
Hewlett Packard Enterprise, better known as HPE announced last week that they are acquiring the business assets of MapR. HPE will now own MapR’s technology, intellectual property, and domain expertise in AI and machine learning and analytics data management.
In related news, a day later, Microsoft announced that it was teaming up with Informatica to provide customers with a free proof-of-value offer to help jumpstart cloud migration.
What does this mean?
At face value, HPE acquiring MapR and Microsoft partnering with Informatica both emphasize data handling and not analytics.
Hadoop was really great for pattern recognition in large datasets, but then deep learning techniques evolved to a point where customers can do the same thing faster, better, and perhaps cheaper.
Enterprise customers are more interested in deep learning frameworks than Hadoop, and they are also moving from on prem to cloud.
With HPE acquiring MapR and customers moving to deep learning solutions, Informatica needed to find new ways to stay relevant.
Why should we care?
MapR and Informatica started a relationship in 2012 to enable their joint customer bases to analyze streaming data with Hadoop. Informatica handled IT integration with enterprise data marts and warehouses, as well as data import and export, while MapR handled Hadoop analytics.
Since then, MapR has developed its own distributed storage interfaces and database solutions for scalable private and public cloud-based workloads.
Insights/comments on the subject from Liftr:
Our take is that HPE’s acquisition of MapR is focused on moving HPE’s data management frameworks into alignment with modern containerized private and public cloud infrastructure. HPE has been focused too much on retaining on prem business that it really lost sight of the cloud. So, we do believe that the acquisition will accelerate HPE’s Intelligent Data Platform capabilities and help HPE move into a cloud native world, on or off-premises.
However, Microsoft didn’t buy Informatica, yet. It looks like Microsoft is testing the waters to leverage Informatica’s integration with legacy data marts and warehouses as an on-ramp to help Microsoft customers migrate into Azure. It looks like blue skies ahead for Microsoft’s Azure cloud, but could Informatica be a long-term acquisition target if Microsoft doesn’t act soon? And who might buy Informatica if Microsoft does not? After all, Dell Technologies already acquired Pivotal.
The bigger question is whether companies like Cloudera, Informatica, and Teradata can now survive on their own, caught between legacy on prem IT providers like Dell and HPE, the public clouds, and SAP.
