DataStax Inc. today said that it has acquired Kesque Inc., a startup with a data platform for powering real-time enterprise applications such as analytics and package tracking services.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

DataStax provides a commercial version of Apache Cassandra, one of the industry’s most popular NoSQL databases. Its software is used by major enterprises, including Sony Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc., a customer base that the company says generates more than $150 million in annual recurring revenue.

Kesque has developed a so-called cloud messaging platform, a type of software used to stream data between enterprise systems. A delivery company, for instance, might use Kesque’s software to beam location data from trucks to its online package tracking portal so customers can check when they can expect their parcel to arrive.

Kesque’s cloud messaging platform can stream up to hundreds of billions of data points per day between systems. Moreover, it does so in nearly real time, meaning new information can be processed by an application right after it’s generated.

The software’s performance is not the only feature that caught DataStax’s attention. Kesque’s platform is a commercial version of an open-source cloud messaging tool known as Apache Pulsar. Pulsar is just one of several such tools available in the open-source ecosystem, but it has a number of features that lend themselves well to the use cases DataStax is targeting.

One of the headline features is that Pulsar and Kesque’s platform provide strong support for multitenancy. That’s a way of building software that enables a company to run one big, centralized deployment of the platform and share it among teams instead of setting up a separate deployment for each team. That centralization can make day-to-day maintenance of Kesque’s software easier compared with some of the other tools in the category. 

In the interest of further easing maintenance, DataStax has repackaged the startup’s software into a new product called Luna Streaming that features an enhanced management console. Luna Streaming is available under an open-source license. For enterprise users looking to deploy the technology in production, DataStax is offering a paid subscription that includes customer support and a service-level agreement.

The company sees Kesque’s technology complementing its flagship Cassandra database distribution. Customers can keep their information in DataStax’s database, while using Luna Streaming to move the information to the applications that need it or import records from external sources.

“Organizations everywhere are increasingly adopting streaming platforms to collect and correlate massively distributed data at high speeds,” DataStax Chief Product Officer Ed Anuff wrote in a blog post today. “These platforms drive real-time analytics and many data science and machine learning initiatives across the enterprise.”

Citing research from International Data Corp., Anuff added that the market for cloud event streaming processing platforms such as Kesque is expected to pass $8 billion by 2024.

Photo: DataStax