Microsoft acquires Metanautix to further analytics strategy

Microsoft has further strengthened its enterprise analytics business with the acquisition of Metanautix, a company that made it possible for businesses to pull together all their data and gain insights into it.

The company's product is capable of pulling in information from a variety of private and public cloud data sources including traditional data warehouses, NoSQL databases like Cassandra and business systems like Salesforce. On aggregation, businesses could use SQL to query the resulting data pipeline in order to glean insights from the information.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed with the announcement on Friday.

Microsoft had little to say about its plans for Metanautix's technology, though corporate vice president Joseph Sirosh revealed that the company planned to roll it into products like SQL Server and Cortana Analytics Suite. The coming months would see more disclosure in the matter.  

According to commentators, the deal was another component of Microsoft's strategy of offering powerful analytics to businesses, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities and making them more productive in an age of data proliferation.

With the access to capabilities most companies couldn't develop on their own, Microsoft aimed to attract more users into its public and private cloud ecosystems.

Firms that want to perform big data analysis upon their whole silo collection (so to speak) they need to move the data into a centralised system. Metanautix works to more efficiently bring structured, unstructured and semi-structured data together by 'combing' it and then 'corralling' it for analytics.

According to Metanautix the action was the creation of a 'data supply chain' and the technology was capable of bringing together lots of different data regardless of type, size or location.

The official blog from Sirosh read as follows, ''With Metanautix technology, IT teams can connect a diversity of their company's information across private and public clouds, without having to go through the costly and complex process of moving data into a centralized system. The solution 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 like Salesforce.com and wide array of other cloud and on-premises data stores.''