Microsoft acquires Metanautix to pursue its analytics ambitions

Microsoft has acquired a young Palo Alto data-focused analytics startup called Metanautix. It explained that Metanautix’s technology helps answer these issues by connecting the “data supply chain”. The big-data startup was backed by $7 million in capital, including cash from well-known firm Sequoia.

Overall, 2015 has turned out to be one of Microsoft’s more aggressive software company acquisition periods, with nearly 20 purchases focusing mostly on “social, mobile, analytics and cloud” category. Metanautix has essentially created a tool dubbed as Quest, which allows SQL queries against any data regardless of where it is. This deal gives Microsoft full ownership of Metanautix.

A good example of Metanautix’s work could be seen in Shutterfly. Cofounder and CTO Toli Lerios served as a software engineer for photo and video analytics at Facebook before teaming up with Vassilakis to start Metanautix in 2012.

According to PC World, the data analytics company’s product can pull information in from a variety of public and private cloud data sources including NoSQL databases like Cassandra, traditional data warehouses, and business systems like Salesforce.

When firms want to perform big data analysis upon their whole silo collection (so to speak) they will normally have to move that data into a centralized system first before they can exert big data analytics upon it. Metanautix is meant to be a more efficient means of bringing structured, unstructured and semi-structured data together by “combing” it and then “corralling” it for analytics.

Vassilakis also weighed in with thoughts on the deal in a Friday blog post.

The announcement was made today with blog posts from both Microsoft and Metanautix. He added that the unit looks forward to reaching the next level with Microsoft within three years, and expects big things with SQL Server and Azure.

Microsoft announced earlier this month that it would integrate its AI assistant Cortana with the company’s PowerBI tools, thus enabling Cortana users to easily access and visualize all sorts of business data. You’ll find instructions and a submission form here: InformationWeek’s Elite 100 2016.