Teradata, a leader in data warehousing and integrated marketing management has finally completed the acquisition of Aster Data, a leader in big data analytics. Providing opportunities to both companies to pitch into the Big Data market, this deal will specifically be useful for Teradata to expand its portfolio and bring businesses a greater depth of analytic insight, and speedy value as they unlock the full potential of their big data.

“With the powerful combination of Teradata and Aster Data, customers will be able to quickly solve complex business problems by leveraging relational and new data sources and types to improve growth and drive profitability,” said Mike Koehler, president and chief executive officer, Teradata Corporation. “We will be able to drive analytical insight that no other single vendor can deliver.”

We have been hearing about the acquisition deal from the start of March 2011, when the company entered into an agreement to buy Aster Data. Teradata is already taking care of data warehousing and now Aster Data will help it tackle the challenge of analyzing such workloads. This acquisition will also enable customers to address varied levels of Big Data challenges with the help of leveraging the power of Aster Data’s patent-pending structured query language, SQL-MapReduce technology, a framework for integrating analytic applications written in a variety of programming languages.

Given his views on this technology as well acquisition, Mayank Bawa, chief customer officer and co-founder, Aster Data said,

“The Aster Data solution allows organizations to differentiate their business so that they can compete and win in today’s market by utilizing innovative data-driven analytic applications against big data types. By joining forces with Teradata, our customers will have new analytic capabilities enabling them to now solve problems in a way that is simply unmatched in the market.”

While the deal was originally expected to close by end of second quarter, both companies sped up the process and completed it ahead of time. Just to recap, Teradata also acquired an 11 percent of stake in Aster Data last year, and will now pay $263 million for the remaining 79 percent.  The deal will fetch profits of $21 million, bringing the total amount down to $242 million. This deal is actually a merger transaction, and includes transfer of Aster’s intellectual property and technology product line too. Teradata will also support Aster Data’s employees by integrating them immediately upon completion of the acquisition.

This is a really good sign for the Cloud industry as a whole. Additionally, we also experienced some other developments in the same segment, such as Juniper Networks recent launch the scalability-focused Converged Supercore suit, an integrated end-to-end optical packet transport solution. Further, IBM is also working on a new virtual server image creation and virtual environments/hybrid cloud automation software, currently operating as an open beta. Akamai, a cloud optimization company, also launched Electronic Software Delivery for Gaming, a download speed increase solution designed specifically for game publisher.