UPDATED 11:50 EDT / JANUARY 09 2018

BIG DATA

Salesforce acquires decentralized database maker Attic Labs

While most of the tech industry’s attention was focused on the Consumer Electronics Show Monday, a startup called Attic Labs Inc. quietly made a big announcement: It has been bought by Salesforce.com Inc. in the cloud giant’s first acquisition of the year.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. However, it’s reasonable to assume that the price tag was in the eight figures given that Attic Labs has raised over $8 million from investors. This is further reaffirmed by the wording of the funding announcement. The post suggests that Salesforce didn’t merely absorb the startup’s engineering talent in an acquihire, but also plans to apply its technology internally.

Attic Labs, which SiliconANGLE profiled in 2016, has created a decentralized database dubbed Nom that differs a great deal from other systems. The open-source platform is most comparable to the Git version control tool commonly used in software development projects.

Designed for storing spreadsheet-style relational records, Nom provides the ability to replicate information across multiple database instances that can run entirely independently from one another. Not even an Internet connection is required. Users may separately modify the information on each deployment and, when the need arises, easily sync them back up.

Nom has conflict resolution features for reconciling diverging records in reconnected database instances. Moreover, past edits are kept on file so that users may restore old information should the situation call for it.

These features lends themselves to a number of specialized applications. Chief among them is the development of collaborative services that enable multiple remote users to work on a piece of content without the risk of overwriting information from another contributor.

As a result, it’s not surprising that the Attic Labs team will be joining Salesforce’s Quip division. The group, which came aboard through a $582 million acquisition in late 2016, offers a platform similar to Google Docs that allows teams to collaboratively author documents. It also supports spreadsheets and embedded widgets that can stream data from external sources into a file.

Image: Salesforce

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU