Teradata, a world leader in data warehousing and integrated marketing management has entered into an agreement to buy Aster Data Systems Inc., a market leader in advanced analytics. This deal is going to prove highly profitable to both companies, especially Teradata, as this will enable the company to expand into the emerging Big Data market.

As a whole, this will enable both companies to tap the potential and utilize the intelligence of Big Data, which has become a growing necessity for cloud services, the enterprise and even consumer products.  Teradata is already taking care of Data warehousing and now Aster will help it tackle the challenge of analyzing such workloads.

“Teradata’s acquisition of Aster Data is another domino in the big data game,” observes Wikibon founder Dave Vellante. “It all started with Oracle Exadata. EMC saw both the threat and opportunity of Exadata and acquired Greenplum. Then IBM went out and bought Netezza and HP, who was woefully lacking in this space, picked  up Vertica. Teradata was exposed because while it’s the leader in traditional data warehousing,  it’s architecture is not well-suited for so-called big data.

“Big data is more unstructured, often distributed and more real time. Aster Data brings more of a true big data capability to Teradata so that it can compete with emerging companies  in this space and add new value to its existing data  business. Wikibon research shows that in big data applications, a massively parallel approach such as those pursued by Aster Data and Greenplum accelerate time to value dramatically. For example, in one case study at a large telco we  found that an MPP  approach broke even in 4 months versus 25 months for a traditional approach.”

The deal is expected to close by the end of the second quarter. Just to recall, 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.

A recent report from Zacks also suggests good position of Teradata based on yesterday’s trading activity.It experienced a gain of 2.52 percent leading the position over Unisys (0.69%),  Infosys (0.44%), IBM (0.12%) and Cognizant (0.11%).

When it comes to Big Data, customer relations is becoming a focal point for this growing sub-market.  As customer service depends on the company’s ability to handle massive data and analyze it quickly, Big Data comes into action, enabling companies to break down and assess the hoards of data that can now be saved, archived and retrieved. It helps increase the transactions for financial institutions like CitiBank, improving the transactional value every time, hence increasing the customer satisfaction and loyalty.  Read the whole story of Citibank’s experience in relation to Big Data here.