Open Source Solutions

I've been "hearing" all day on Twitter that Microsoft would be announcing something big at OSCON2008. Perhaps this is it:

Microsoft today announced that it intends to acquire DATAllegro, provider of breakthrough data warehouse appliances. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Microsoft’s mission-critical data platform, making it easier and more cost effective for customers of all sizes to manage and glean insight from the ever expanding amount of data generated by and for businesses, employees and consumers.
-- Press Release "Microsoft to Acquire DATAllegro"

This is very interesting given the progress that Microsoft has made with its analytic services binding MS Office and SQL Server. Further quoting from the press release:

“Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers enterprise-class capabilities in business intelligence and data warehousing and the addition of the DATAllegro team and their technology will take our data platform to the highest scale of data warehousing.”
-- Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft

The direction for DATAllegro's data warehouse appliance is also made clear in the press release:

“DATAllegro's integration with SQL Server is the opti mal next generation solution and the acquisition by Microsoft is a great conclusion for the company.”
-- Lisa Lambert, Intel Capital managing director, Software and Solutions Group.

For those who don't know, DATAllegro is a data warehousing appliance company that utilizes "EMC® storage, Dell™ servers, Cisco® InfiniBand switches, Intel® multi-core CPUs and the Ingres® open source database".

So, whither Ingres in this acquisition? As we've written before here, Ingres is one of the earliest and strongest RDBMS products, which was absorbed by CA and then spun off again with an open source play in 2005. MS SQL Server, of course, started out as a rebranding of Sybase SQL*Server, until the partnership dissolved in the mid-1990's. Since then, MS SQL Server has been geared mostly as a workgroup and data mart server. It seems that a switch from Ingres to MS SQL Server could heavily undermine DATAllegro's business. In addition, the switchover in code to T-SQL will be a nightmare for developers. Add to that the challenges of moving from Linux to MS Windows, and from C/C++ to C# and it will take quite some time in production environments to iron out all the wrinkles.

In addition, while most seem to think that this puts Microsoft in a good position to challenge Oracle for the Enterprise Data Warehouse lead, it actually puts Microsoft directly into competition with other DW appliance vendors, such as Teradata. I truly doubt that this move will position Microsoft strongly into competition with either Oracle or Teradata, but merely marks another tactical error in Microsoft's increasingly desperate acquisition strategy to move deeper into the Enterprise on one hand, while striving to move further into the online space on the other.

More can be read at:

• VentureBeat "Microsoft Acquires DATAllegro"
• Information Week: "Microsoft to Buy DATAllegro"
• Mark Madsen in Intelligent Enterprise "What the Microsoft-DatAllegro Deal Means for Customers, Vendors and BI"