Dayton, OH-based Teradata (NYSE: [[ticker:TDC]]), which has roughly 1,000 employees at its Teradata Labs engineering unit in San Diego, says today it has acquired StackIQ, a six-year-old startup near San Diego that specializes in software used to automate datacenters in the cloud.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But reading between the lines, the acquisition has Oliver Ratzesberger’s fingerprints all over it.
When I talked with Ratzesberger early last year, he said Teradata was “heading full-steam into the cloud.” A former analytic software executive at eBay and Sears Holdings, Ratzesberger was helping to chart Teradata’s course from the shoals of its once-lucrative legacy business. After spinning out from the cash-register maker NCR in 2007, Teradata had focused on selling its proprietary data mining technology as part of its multi-million-dollar hardware installations for big corporate customers.
A year ago, Ratzesberger was president of Teradata Labs, overseeing the company’s engineering R&D. He remains in San Diego, and continues to oversee Teradata Labs, but his title now includes executive vice president and chief product officer.
As Teradata moved into the cloud, Ratzesberger said he was overseeing a broad effort to integrate platforms, unify data, develop more innovative analytics, and to adapt and support open-source initiatives like Presto and Hadoop. That’s where StackIQ fits in. StackIQ co-founders Greg Bruno, Tim McIntire, and Mason Katz (pictured above) started the company in 2011 to develop software for highly distributed server clusters running the Hadoop open source framework. It is now based in Solana Beach, CA, a coastal community about 23 miles north of San Diego.
The buyout includes StackIQ’s technology, as well as McIntire and the startup’s engineering team. A Teradata spokeswoman said the company is not disclosing exactly how many StackIQ engineers are joining Teradata, or the startup’s total headcount.
StackIQ says its software helps customers provision and manage “bare metal” data centers and helps to automate the operation of large-scale networks with tens, hundreds, or thousands of computer servers. From today’s statement: “StackIQ is the commercial entity behind the open source bare metal installer, Stacki. Stacki is a very fast and ultra-reliable Linux server provisioning tool that takes systems from bare metal to a cluster-ready base install.”
In the statement, Ratzesberger is quoted as saying, “Adding StackIQ technology to IntelliFlex, IntelliBase, and IntelliCloud will strengthen are capabilities and enable Teradata to redefine how systems are deployed and managed globally.”
StackIQ has raised over $12.8 million in venture capital, and its investors include OurCrowd, Keshif Ventures, Grayhawk Capital, DLA Piper, Avalon Ventures, and Anthem Venture Partners.
StackIQ also was among 13 companies selected as an Xconomy San Diego Tech Company to Watch in 2016, and the fourth to get acquired (following Cyber Genomics, Nervana Systems, and CyberFlow Analytics).
