Data movement specialist Attunity Ltd. has picked up a low-key outfit called Appfluent Technology Inc. to expand its value proposition for organizations adopting Hadoop. The deal brings needed monitoring capabilities to the table that can help track the flow of data into the platform.

The addition of the technology to Attunity’s software arsenal couldn’t come at a better time. “More and more enterprises are looking to Hadoop to augment existing, expensive data warehouse deployments,” highlighted Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly. “According to our research, over 60 percent of Hadoop practitioners have already shifted one or more data warehouse or mainframe workloads to Hadoop and we expect that trend to accelerate.”

That’s a lot of data to move around and potentially a lot of business for Attunity. The acquisition is meant to help its offering stand out from that of SyncSort, Inc., Informatica Corp. and the numerous other migration vendors vying for the same opportunity.

The Maryland-based Appfluent has developed an agentless monitoring stack that sifts through traffic to glean information about the data moving around  the environment and pool the metrics in an offline repository where it’s correlated with other information such as user activity. “Attunity has been traditionally very good about moving data,” said Lawrence Schwartz, Attunity’s vice president of marketing. “This is about figuring out what you want to move.”

The functionality can help reduce infrastructure requirements while improving the experience of the analysts running their queries in the environment, regardless of whether it’s based in Hadoop or a more conventional data warehouse. “Hadoop lets you step back and look at how you tier your systems, with the highest-performance, most frequently accessed data still in the warehouse, with perhaps data lakes on a more more cost-effective platform,” Schwartz said.   

Attunity is shelling out $18 million for the technology, which represents a reasonable return on the $4.1 million that investors have put into Appfluent.

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