SAP SE last night finally confirmed that it has acquired the Big Data-focused startup Altiscale Inc. for an undisclosed fee.

The confirmation comes following initial reports of the deal that first surfaced back in August, when the price was speculated to be around the $125 million mark. Palo Alto, CA-based Altiscale sells cloud-based versions of Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark software for analyzing, storing and processing data in the cloud. SAP reckons that these offerings will complement its own Big Data services.

“Altiscale has focused on cloud and data infrastructure with its Altiscale Data Cloud offering, which starts with a highly optimised cloud infrastructure, continues with a Spark and Hadoop data platform,” Ken Tsai, SAP’s vice president and head of cloud platform and data management, said in a statement. “Altiscale is a natural fit for SAP, as we share our overall focus of helping enterprises derive business value from data – and successfully leverage Big Data.”

Altiscale will now continue as an integrated Big Data-as-a-Service offering from SAP. The software giant said it was prompted to buy Altiscale thanks to its established customer base and its potential to provide solutions outside of SAP’s immediate area of focus in Big Data — for example, in the Internet of Things (IoT), business networks and line-of-business cloud applications.

Tsai also reckons the combination of SAP’s existing SAP HANA Vora Big Data processing technology and Altiscale’s own offerings will allow the company to deliver a “holistic and accelerated Big Data solution” to its customers. “Altiscale’s Hadoop-as-a-Service (HaaS) capabilities enable SAP to offer a much more comprehensive and robust enterprise solution that meets the unique needs of customers on their digital transformation journey,” he said.

Fixing Big Data’s “broken promise”

Writing in CMS Wire, Virginia Backaitis said that SAP’s real motivation is to be able to provide the same kinds of Big Data-crunching and analytics capabilities as rivals firms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Inc. provide to their own customers. The Altiscale acquisition also might help SAP begin to fix the “broken promise of Big Data” that SiliconANGLE described in a story Tuesday. Non-tech companies have struggled to get open-source-driven Big Data projects into full production because there are so many overlapping choices and a scarcity of Big Data talent to implement projects.

It’s a problem that Altiscale has been aware of since its inception, and one that it set out to fix by taking the complexity out of companies’ hands and essentially, doing the hard work for them. As CMS Wire’s Backaitis notes, Altiscale likens its service to a “Big Data dial tone” for companies that are unable to build and run enterprise scale Hadoop themselves. The company promises a “Big Data-as-a-Managed-Service” solution that it claims provides companies with instant access to skilled engineers and the scalable cloud infrastructure they need to drive their Big Data projects.

“Altiscale would enable SAP to help customers with high-scale data capacity and data pipelines without relying on third-party vendors,” Constellation Research Inc. analyst Doug Henschen said last month when rumors of the acquisition surfaced.

Henschen explained that by absorbing Altiscale, SAP would be able to fill out its own portfolio of Big Data products while leveraging its infrastructure in Europe and its decades-long relationships with some of the world’s biggest enterprises, and possibly become a notable player in the BDaaS market.

Whether that actually happens remains to be seen, but Altiscale CEO Raymie Stata seemed confident that the companies were on the right track following the merger.

“The opportunity to complete the vision by adding fully managed Hadoop and Spark in the cloud was just too powerful to pass up for both companies,” Stata said in a statement. “We found in each other an ideal partner.”

**Editor’s note: The article originally stated that Constellation Research’s Doug Henschen said SAP “could become THE major player in the BDaaS market”, which is inaccurate. The article has now been updated with Henschen’s correct comments.

Image credit: Altiscale