Qubole is Latest Acquisition Target

Idera Inc., the software development tool vendor, is acquiring data lake specialist Qubole Inc. as Idera expands its database tools portfolio.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Houston-based Idera said Tuesday (Oct. 13) Qubole would be folded into its database tool unit that includes AquaFold, Webyog and WhereScape. The deal for Qubole gives Idera a cloud-native data management platform aimed at streaming analytics, data pipelines and machine learning workloads.

Qubole’s data lake platform supports versions of Airflow, Hive, Presto and Spark, offering data workload capabilities while helping customers reduce the cost of cloud data lakes.

“Companies generate and store both structured and unstructured data at unprecedented levels,” Idera CEO Randy Jacops said in announcing the acquisition. “Qubole’s reputation as the leading cross-platform solution focused on unstructured data is a fantastic addition to Idera’s Database Tools division.

Jacops said Qubole would “pair well” with Idera’s WhereScape unit, which specializes in automation tools for data warehouses.

Current Qubole data lake customers include Adobe, Disney, Oracle. It has also partnered with Snowflake to allow Qubole’s big data processing engines, including Apache Spark and TensorFlow, to read and write data to Snowflake’s data warehouse.

The deal for Qubole, Santa Clara, Calif., continues a steady stream of analytics and database acquisitions as buyers seek to expand their big data services portfolios. Idera and other deal makers are looking for synergies among their current offerings and up-and-coming platform specialists like Qubole with growing partner networks.

Qubole aims it data lake platform at “ad hoc” analytics, data streaming and, increasingly, machine learning workloads trained on large volumes of structured and unstructured data. The approach is promoted as allowing data scientists to spin up clusters on public clouds to accelerate development of ad hoc or batch queries. Automation features then scale cloud computing resources as needed.

Along with Snowflake, Qubole has recently announced partnerships with data engineering specialist Ascend.io to create “self-service” data pipelines that run faster while requiring less code.

In releasing the latest version of its data lake platform over the summer, Qubole also announced expansion of its partnership with Informatica and its data integration tools.

Those and other partnerships aim to simplify data lake management as more data is scattered across on-premise and cloud storage.

Prior to its acquisition by Idera, Quoble had raised about $78 million in venture funding, according to the web site Crunchbase.com.

Recent items:

R Works Its Way Into Qubole’s Data Lake

Snowflake Taps Qubole for Deep Machine Learning in the Cloud