QlikTech International AB today announced plans to buy Attunity Ltd. in a $560 million deal that’s set to give it a bigger slice of the lucrative data management market.

The acquisition price breaks down to $23.50 per share, an 18 percent premium to the Wednesday closing price of Attunity’s stock. It’s a respectable conclusion to the software maker’s 31-year run as an independent firm. As for Qlik, the deal accelerates a market expansion that it launched last year after acquiring Podium Data Inc., another provider of data management software.

Philadelphia-based Qlik historically has focused mainly on business intelligence. It sells software that enables enterprises to visualize their data in graphically rich dashboards and run analyses to find useful patterns. Qlik is now looking to expand its roles in companies’ business intelligence projects by helping them with the task of preparing data for processing, which is often more time-consuming than the analysis itself.

Today’s acquisition should significantly boost the provider’s efforts. Attunity has an array of software products designed to help enterprise move records from different business systems into their analytics applications, one of the most technically complex parts of the data preparation workflow.

The company’s flagship offering is a platform called Replicate. It comes in several editions, including one specifically designed to move data into cloud-based analytics environments, and provides automation features to ease the process. One of the standout capabilities is a mechanism that can monitor the original system from which a given set of records was pulled and sync changes made to the original data to the analytics environment.

Attunity also sells products for handling other aspects of data management. One offering, Compose, helps with tasks such removing inaccurate records, while another product called Visibility monitors the cost and usage of analytics systems.

Alongside this product portfolio, the acquisition will buy Qlik a significant number of customer accounts. Attunity’s software is used by more than 2,000 organizations worldwide, including half the enterprises on the Fortune 100. The company also has partnerships with Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp., Cloudera Inc. and other major industry players that Qlik said will help grow its market reach.

The acquisition is set to close in the second quarter.

Image: Qlik