Actian, formerly known as Ingres, is set to acquire Pervasive Software, a vendor of cloud-based and on-premises software for data management and analysis. Wikibon Analyst Jeff Kelly described these two companies and what they’re known for.

Actian is the company behind the OpenSource database Ingres. The company also offers a number of other products, including Vectorwise, which is an analytics database, some applications for end-users centered around analytics and other applications for automating data management tasks.

On the other hand, Pervasive is a public company who did about $49M in revenue during the last fiscal year. Their legacy is found in data integration and data management products. They have recently jumped into the waters of big data business with their line of DataRush products, which are designed to make Hadoop and other big data platforms run more efficiently.

“Pervasive’s products can actually increase efficiency significantly in the Hadoop environments,” he observed, when asked if Pervasive was a good fit for Actian. He said that although Hadoop software is free to download, the customer still has to lay out cash for the hardware, and they want to get the most out of that hardware. That’s where Pervasive comes into the picture. “Pervasive technology applied to Actian customer environments could be a benefit.”

Kelly believes there will be more M&A (mergers and acquistions) activity in the big data space in the coming year. He said that while there probably won’t be many high-profile or mega-deals happening, look for more acquisitions of the smaller players, much like this Actian-Pervasive deal. See the entire segment with Kristin Feledy and Jeff Kelly on the Morning NewsDesk Show.