BeyondVC

Data wars heating up - Microsoft buys DATAllegro

As I have written in previous posts, what you do with data will be one of the next battlegrounds on the web.  Knowing that they had some limitations with SQL Server, Microsoft announced its acquisition of DATAllegro (full disclosure: my fund is an investor in competitor Greenplum) to enter the data warehousing market.  Enterprise volumes across the board are ramping up quickly and this clearly gives Microsoft an opportunity to capture that market.  Being an investor in Greenplum, I always like to see healthy exits of competitors as many believe it will trigger further consolidation.  When a competitor is acquired, the first reaction from many is often asking themselves why it wasn't them and fear about competing with a juggernaut, but my perspective is quite different as it usually opens new opportunities.  As I have written before, many acquisitions fail and companies are usually so distracted for the first 6-12 months trying to integrate operationally and technically, that this gives others in the market a nice window to continue executing on their business plan.  So I tip my hat to DATAllegro and look forward to an exciting 12-18 months ahead as the data wars are clearly heating up now. 

Picks and shovels for the web

We have had quite a resurgence in the web market during the last few years.  A number of great companies have come out of nowhere to become household names, and it seems that everyday we are inundated with news on another slew of new web startups going after the consumer.  And yes, looking for the next YouTube or Facebook or Myspace is exciting.  Depsite all of that, the one area is that is not discussed much is the boring infrastructure market where companies sell the picks and shovels to allow these startups to run their operations.  And what could be more boring than talking about a database or data warehouse?  Anyway, I am glad that Don Clark of the Wall Street Journal wrote a nice article on a new breed of startups going after the database market.  Shamelessly, I would like to add that he has a nice writeup on Greenplum (full disclosure: my fund is an investor and i am a board member).

Granted, the opportunity to make money selling picks and shovels during this web resurgence is definitely much harder as developers typically go for free and cheap software and hardware to launch their new companies.  That being said, every click that we make is being stored somewhere and the companies who can better analyze this data to better monetize their sites will be the winners in the next phase of the web.  This is where Greenplum comes into play.  The company is not only playing off of the data volume and analysis trend but also the move towards commiditization.  As Don mentions in his article, the secret sauce is that our customers can deploy massive data warehouses using our software which is built on top of the open source database Postgres and deploy it on commodity boxes.  The benefit is not only in terms of cost but also in significant performance increases over the competition.  As per Don's article today:

One user is iCrossing Inc., of Scottsdale, Ariz., which provides analytical services to companies that operate Web sites. Analyzing a day's worth of some types of data once took 20 to 22 hours, said Tony Wasson, the company's vice president of engineering. With Greenplum's technology, and some modifications to its own software, the job now takes about an hour, he said.

Anyway, it is nice to see the mainstream press finally getting the fact that data and analytics matter. Yes, plumbing is boring, but without cost effective platforms which can scale and perform under heavy stress, we won't be able to reach the full peak of monetization on the web.