Data Sheet—Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Thanks to the Data Sheet reader who pointed out the wonky link for yesterday’s item about If This Then That (aka IFTTT). Here’s your second chance to read about why this startup is getting another $30 million for its scheme to create smart links between cloud services. What’s up this Wednesday morning? Why, yes, more security news—both breaches and buyouts. Plus, Teradata is making its third big data acquisition in less than two months—it just bought integrator Think Big Analytics, which advised the likes of Facebook, Intel, NetApp and Johnson & Johnson on strategy. Learn more about the rationale in today’s FAQ item.

Hacks crowd headlines. OK, we get publicists are miffed over the "brute force" Apple iCloud hack that exposed (ahem) celebrities including J-Law and Kirsten Dunst. But businesses should be far more concerned over Home Depot's revelation that it "may" be the latest retailer hit by the ongoing rash of Backoff point-of-sale data break-ins. It hasn't confirmed anything, but this could be as big as the Target debacle. The good news for hack-gawkers? Looks like the banking breaches reported last week may have been confined to J.P. Morgan.

Will going private revive Compuware? Investment firm Thoma Bravo is paying $2.5 billion for the mainframe and apps management software developer, which more than 7,100 clients including Cisco Systems and Domino's Pizza. Now, we can all speculate over the fate of travel and expensive software company Concur, which apparently approached Oracle and SAP (among others?) about a sale.

Privatized Dell doing just fine, thank you very much. Now that it's not public, it sure loves partners. In an exclusive interview with CRN, Michael Dell says his eponymous company has added 4,300 new customers since February—by courting the indirect sales channel he once shunned. Then again, it should be doing well, with two former IBM sales bigwigs leading the charge.

CLOUD CHATTER

Google gets back to business, er work. Is the cloud services company downplaying its enterprise ambitions with this week's rebranding? Or angling for a bigger piece of Microsoft's business stronghold? You decide. No, really. Anyway, here's more perspective from Amit Singh, the man behind Google's workplace pitch.

New month-to-month subscriptions for Office 365. If your company supports a BYOD expense policy for tablets, Microsoft's latest revisions to the iPad versions of Excel, PowerPoint and Word bring pricing changes that could alter how you reimburse employees.

STATS & SPECS

Attention budget-conscious hardware buyers. AMD is countering Intel's desktop processor debut last week with additions to its two-year-old, eight-core line. One obvious difference is cost: $150 to $200 per chip for this latest trio, compared with $999 on Intel's high-end Haswell technology.

BlackBerry Passport on the horizon. The re-energized enterprise mobility company is planning invite-only launch events for its oddly shaped, square smartphone, but (fittingly) you'll need a passport to attend in Toronto, London or Dubai.

STARTUPS & DISRUPTORS

Security, security, security. AVG Technologies will pay up to $220 million for developer Location Labs, which protects wireless operators and Android smartphones and gadgets. It expects an immediate revenue bump of $60 million to $70 million in 2015.

BeyondTrust bags buyer. Its context-aware identity management technology is trusted by 4,000 companies, including 10 of the biggest banks and seven of the top 10 pharma companies. It's not naming the amount, but reports peg the deal at $310 million.

Were you aware? Luminoso's sentiment analysis tech offers context around words, not just numbers. In June, it got $6.5 million in funding, part of which will pay the salary for the IBM exec it just hired to lead enterprise sales.

FAQ

That was fast. In the inaugural issue of Data Sheet, I wrote about Think Big Analytics, a four-year-old systems integrator with 100 experts in a who's who list of big data open source technologies including Hadoop, NoSQL, Hive, Storm, MapReduce, Pig and Spark. As of this morning, it's officially part of Teradata, which now has snapped up third big data startups in the past six weeks, including Revelytix and Hadapt.

The terms weren't disclosed, but here's the mission: expand Teradata's vendor-neutral services reach. "It's hard to build growth organically within this emerging space," says Teradata services vice president Chris Twogood. "The pipeline was bigger than we had resources to fill."

Likewise, the Teradata union gives Think Big a global reach faster than the Mountain View, Calif.-based company could have realized on its own, notes co-founder Rick Farnell. "It's really about speed and direction."

Teradata already has 5,000 consultants on its payroll focused on helping enterprises make the most of investments in its own technologies. While Think Big is obviously much smaller, the buyout marks the start of a broader, accelerated investment in vendor-neutral skills, Twogood says.

Think Big (which gets to keep that part of its name) was attractive for several reasons: notably its pure play approach and its burgeoning library of "value accelerators" for speeding delivery of big data projects (so far, there are a couple focused on clickstream and device data analytics).

Not coincidentally, Think Big boasts experience in integration projects involving key Teradata technologies (although the vendor-neutral thing was emphasized several times during my briefing). "We can stand up and fully support these engagements far more quickly than usual," Farnell says.

What do you think of Teradata's investments? Shoot me an email at datasheet@heatherclancy.com.

ONE MORE THING ...

What's in storage? By 2019, up to 20% of enterprise arrays will replace hard drives with solid state technology. So far, IBM, EMC and Pure Storage are leading the charge. But if you want to go with a "visionary," Gartner's new Magic Quadrant for the category suggests these are the five companies to watch: Kaminario, Nimbus Data, Skyera, SolidFire and Violin Memory.