Microsoft acquires Metanautix, an analytics startup that helps big companies navigate their data
Microsoft has acquired a young Palo Alto startup called Metanautix, a firm specializing in helping large enterprises filter through their hordes of in-house data. Terms of the deal haven't been disclosed
Context & Ripple Effects
Metanautix is the second analytics tuck-in Microsoft has made in under a year: in January it bought Revolution Analytics to bolster its R-based analytics services, and December's undisclosed purchase of the Palo Alto startup extends the same push into helping enterprises navigate their own in-house data.
Four years on, the arc pays off visibly — Azure Synapse Analytics, unveiled in 2019, unifies big data analytics with tools for managing varied data sources in one workspace, which reads as exactly the problem Metanautix was built to solve.
First-order effects
- Metanautix's team and technology fold into Microsoft's analytics portfolio, meaning enterprise customers will encounter its capabilities inside Microsoft products rather than as a standalone offering.
Second-order effects
- Each bolt-on narrows the gap between Microsoft's data stack and rival clouds' — a gap Cycle Computing's multi-cloud orchestration buy in 2017 also targeted from the workload side.
Third-order effects
- If the sequence holds — capability acquisition in 2015, integrated service by 2019 — the structural lesson is that cloud vendors assemble enterprise-data platforms through serial tuck-ins, leaving independent analytics startups with acquisition as their most likely exit.
The trend: Microsoft is building its unified enterprise data-analytics stack piece by piece through small capability acquisitions rather than single large bets.