For Actian, the deal means it has a big data offering to round out its current suite of database product that include the Ingres relational database, the Versant object database and the Vectorwise analytic database. Vectorwise is a single-server product best suited for data volumes between 1 and 50 terabytes, CEO Steve Shine told me, but ParAccel is a true big data technology designed to scale across many machines and potentially petabytes of data.

ParAccel has a litany list of big customers, as well as some major license deals for its massively parallel database technology. The most impressive is probably AWS, which uses ParAccel to power the analytic capabilities of its cloud-based Redshift data warehouse service. Amazon actually led a sizeable investment round in ParAccel that closed in July 2011. (I’ve seen it estimated between $15 million and $20 million.)

Actian is a relatively quiet company given its roughly $150 million in annual revenue — mostly outside the United States — but it could get a lot more attention soon. This is its fourth acquisition in the past five months, with the most recent being data integration and big data analytics specialist Pervasive Software, a deal that closed earlier in April. Now, Shine explained, it has database products to cover numerous use cases, as well as the tools to ensure quality control and merge data from many sources. Actian closed its acquisition of Versant in December.

The company also has a Hadoop story now. Pervasive’s DataRush platform can run on top of Hadoop and churn through lots of data MapReduce-style, but, it claims, much faster. ParAccel also integrates with Hadoop, meaning users can move data from Hadoop to ParAccel for faster, deeper analysis than MapReduce enables.

One has to assume ParAccel didn’t come cheap for Actian. ParAccel has raised, I believe, $93 million in venture capital since 2007 (it’s somewhat opaque about this information), and its competitors have sold for between $300 million (Greenplum to EMC) and $1.7 billion (Netezza to IBM) in 2010. HP also bought Vertica for an undisclosed amount in 2011.

Actian CEO Shine wouldn’t comment on the price, other than to say he expects big data will easily be the company’s biggest growth sector in terms of revenue over the next several years and that he wasn’t about to miss out on it.

“The market opportunity is enormous,” he said. “Absolutely enormous.”

I must say, though, I did not see the Actian acquisition coming. I predicted in 2011 that ParAccel would be acquired, but I expected it would happen a lot sooner and the buyer would be a much larger company.

For a little more on ParAccel, here’s an interview GigaOM did with Co-founder and CTO Barry Zane at our Structure: Data conference in 2011.

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Redshift, based on technology from ParAccel, claims to offer big-time data warehouse capability for a tenth of the price of legacy suppliers and, as of today, customers can start finding out for themselves if it lives up to the hype. If it does, it will uphold Amazon’s reputation for disrupting tech giants. Redshift availability was announced on the AWS blog.

One of the service’s key attractions, according to several attendees at last November’s AWS: Reinvent show where it was announced, was that Redshift will let customers keep on using their analytics tool of choice, be it MicroStrategy, Jaspersoft or Cognos.  Since training up people on new analytics is a big expense and time suck, that is important.

According to the blog:

“You can use the High Storage Extra Large (15 GiB of RAM, 4.4 ECU, and 2 TB of local attached    compressed user data) for $0.85 per hour or the High Storage Eight Extra Large (120 GiB of RAM, 35 ECU, and 16 TB of local attached user data) for $6.80 per hour. With either instance type, you pay an effective price of $3,723 per terabyte per year for storage and processing. One Year and Three Year Reserved Instances are also available, pushing the annual cost per terabyte down to $2,190 and $999, respectively.”

It’s clear that Amazon’s Redshift will compete not only with things like EMC Greenplum, IBM Netezza and HP Vertica, but also with BitYota and Treasure Data which also run on AWS infrastructure. And it will also spar with Paraccel’s own data warehouse. But Paraccel CEO Chuck Berger told InformationWeek that he expects Amazon’s version will whet the appetite of customers for Paraccel’s own on-premises implementation.

For more on Redshift check out AWS’ introductory video here:

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The new licensing model, officially called Right to Deploy, supports what the company calls “unconstrained analytics.” The idea is that data scientists can stop worrying about how many nodes or terabytes they’re storing in ParAccel and instead focus on drawing insights from their data, said John Santaferraro, ParAccel’s vice president of solutions and product marketing.

Santaferraro declined to describe the formula for determining the price for a company to go with Right to Deploy, saying only that it will depend on the company and what the company wants to do with its data. Still, he believes it’s a good choice for clients. “It’s even more cost-effective than the per-node pricing (model),” Santaferraro said. “There’s no reason why customers wouldn’t want to do it.”

Right to Deploy seems to make sense as more companies are embracing big data and storing more data than ever before in order to run more thorough and complex analytics. GigaOM Research analyst Lynn Langit expects other companies to try the model “as (clients) want to keep more of their data,” she wrote in an email.

Amazonbecame a ParAccel investor in 2011 and gained more exposure in November when Amazon Web Services announced its Redshift data warehouse service, which incorporates technology licensed from ParAccel.

Big data luminaries will discuss use cases, challenges and achievements at the GigaOM Structure:Data conference in New York on March 20-21.

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Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle

That gives both Cloudant and Rackspace customers more options. Cloudant customers tend to deploy very dsitributed data-intensive, real-time applications, which are a good fit with Rackspace’s reach and performance, Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle said in a statement.

The Cloudant Data Layer builds on a CouchDB-compatible “RESTful JSON API, built-in full text search from Apache Lucene and an incremental MapReduce Engine, the  company said.

(REST stands for representational state transfer and developers increasingly turn to RESTful APIs to build  to build scalable, real-time web applications. JSON or JavaScript Object Notation is commonly used standard data interchange format.)

Cloud vendors, not surprisingly, are pushing their respective infrastructure as a platform for database processing jobs. A few weeks ago, Amazon, with partner Paraccel, launched RedShift, a new data warehouse application. For other database loads, Amazon ‘s Relational Database Service (RDS) gives customers a choice of running MySQL, SQL Server or Oracle databases. It also offers its own home-grown DynamoDB as a NoSQL option and SimpleDB.

OpenNebula nests private sandbox inside AWS public cloud

C12G Labs, the company behind the OpenNebula cloud infrastructure used by CERN, the European Space Agency and some other heavy hitters, will now give users a way to spin up a secure OpenNebula-based sandbox inside Amazon’s public cloud.  Such an option could prove popular for developers who love the ease and low cost of AWS, but want more security and additional capabilities for training, development and testing.

“The idea is to build a private cloud on Amazon in a few seconds — the nested cloud uses emulation for the virtualizatoin nodes and so is mainly for training, development and testing purposes,”  OpenNebula GM Ignacio Llorente told me via email.

The actual deliverable is a CentOS 6.3-based virtual appliance with automated installation and prepackaged images which uses emulation to execute virtual machines. Users can log into the OpenNebula cloud to monitor their managed resources, launch VMs without having to worry about the underlying physical infrastructure, according to a statement.

Dell reiterates (quietly) OpenStack support

At Dell World 2012 last week, Dell buried a statement that its upcoming public cloud will be based on the OpenStack cloud platform. As ITWorld reported, this was news albeit not really surprising, since Dell was an early-ish OpenStack proponent and has also worked with Morphlabs on an OpenStack-based all-SSD storage cloud.

As Nancy Gohring reported:

In 2011,  [Dell] said it planned to launch a public cloud based on an open source platform. Since Dell has been a supporter of the OpenStack Foundation and has used OpenStack in private cloud offerings, it would be unusual for it to go with Eucalyptus.

But Dell had also said it would have a public cloud in 2012, so the buried statement represents a delay. It also offered a preview of its OpenStack-based private cloud.

Also at ` Inktank, the Dreamhost spinoff dedicated to pushing Ceph as an open-source storage alternative, formally joined forces with Dell. That alliance is not really surprising given that DreamHost had already worked with Dell to make Dell’s open source Crowbar configuration tool compatible with Ceph.

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Case in point: On Wednesday at the AWS: Reinvent show, Amazon announced the preview of its Redshift data warehousing service to considerable hubbub — pitching it as a much-less costly competitor to Oracle, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Teradata solutions. A few hours later, startup BitYota got up on stage to plug its data warehouse-as-service running atop AWS. You see where I’m going with this, right?

BitYota CEO Dev Patel

Now, BitYota CEO Dev Patel, a former Yahoo exec, says there are data warehouses and then there are data warehouses. Bityota built its Software-as-a-Service offering from the ground up with its own technology and crafted it so users won’t have to sweat how to configure compute instances or storage. And doesn’t include Hadoop, so it will sport a performance advantage there. And they won’t have to hire Hadoop eggheads, who are expensive and hard to find.

BitYota, which just disclosed $12 million seed and Series A funding from Globespan Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others, uses Amazon EC2 compute, elastic block storage (EBS), but the rest is its own technology. A preview of AWS Redshift, which licenses technology from Paraccel, is available now. Companies can use existing analytics products from MicroStrategy, Jaspersoft, Cognos with Redshift, Andy Jassy, AWS senior vice president said at AWS: Reinvent on Wednesday.

BitYota and Redshift aren’t the only Amazon-based data warehousing games in town. Treasure Data also runs on Amazon infrastructure.

One thing is clear: Data warehouses in their current incarnation are big and expensive to build and maintain and these cloud providers all see opportunity disrupting that apple cart. ”I wouldn’t want to be Vertica right now,” said one wag at the show, referring to the data warehousing company HP bought last year.

But perhaps a bigger question for these startups running atop AWS is whether their platform provider will be more of a competitor than a partner going forward.

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For the San Francisco-based Metamarkets (see disclosure), the Series B round brings its total to $23.5 million, and represents some serious confidence in the company’s cloud-based analytics platform. Investors should be confident: the company has a handful of customers, but they’re rather large, and it has already spurned acquisition offers from some household names in the IT world, including Twitter.

ParAccel is in another league altogether, having now raised nearly $100 million over the past several years, and having just completed a first quarter that saw 500 percent year-over-year revenue growth. It’s one of the best-known independent analytic database providers around after Greenplum, Netezza and Vertica all got snatched up by large vendors in the past few years. Last summer, Amazon came on board as a strategic investor, a move rife with possibility considering persistent rumors of an Amazon Web Services analytic offering.

However, big data isn’t constrained to companies building the technology. Often times, as with DataPop, it’s the consumers of big data technologies that are the most interesting. At just under $9 million, it’s hardly the highest-backed user of big data, even in the marketing space, but the story is the same across the board. In theory, big data means more-accurate and dynamic ad targeting, which means more money for everyone.

Terascala plays in an entirely different field — the high-performance computing field — where the speed of big data systems becomes critical. Terascala and companies of its ilk don’t analyzing anything, rather they feed enormous scientific (and other) data sets to high-performance processors without creating a bottleneck. That means their research, government, media and financial services users can do existing analyses much faster, and can even do entirely new types of analysis that used to be slowed by a lack of performance and a lack of analytic tools (e.g., Hadoop).

When buzzwords reach a certain level of ubiquity, they start to mean both everything and nothing, which is arguably the case for big data right now. But I don’t see it as too big a problem. I see it as a new understanding of the power of data, which — harnessed correctly — is immense. For investors, it’s not a question of whether to put money behind big data, but of figuring out which of the dozens pitching themselves as big data companies are actually doing it right.

Image courtesy of Flickr user kaibara87.

Disclosure: Metamarkets is a portfolio company of True Ventures, which is also an investor in GigaOM. Om Malik is also a venture partner at True.

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This deal is just the latest evidence that while collecting big data is important, the ability to put that data into formats that make sense to business users is equally critical.

ParAccel builds a fast columnar database specifically designed to analyze lots and lots of information. In that arena, it competes with Vertica, Greenplum, Netezza and Aster Data, once-independent companies that were all acquired in the past two years by Hewlett-Packard, EMC, IBM, and Teradata respectively.

Birst CEO Brad Peters maintains that the Birst/ParAccel technology duo will compete with high-end solutions like those and SAP’s HANA analytics appliance at a fraction of the cost.

Target uses include customer service call centers or big telco billing applications, he said.  ”This is for any jobs where you have a really high volume of interactions that can generate hundreds of millions or billions of data points,” that need to be sorted out, classified and visualized, he said.

The partnership means Birst will use ParAccel technology as part of its solution, and make Birst available to ParAccel customers. A ParAccel spokeswoman said the two companies have done a lot of integration work, that ParAccel is using Birst internally, she said.

ParAccel also partners with MicroStrategy, but MicroStrategy’s technology suits more complex enterprise rollouts that take time to sell and implement while Birst’s SaaS capability suits it for quicker, easier sales cycles.

Birst, which offers its business analytics both in an on-premises appliance and as software-as-a-service, competes with Pentaho, an open-source analytics provider and Jaspersoft, both of which also work with ParAccel databases.

It makes sense for database companies to partner with analytics players but given the amount of consolidation that’s already gone on in these worlds, it’s probably just a matter of time before some of these smaller analytics companies join the ranks of the acquired.

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However, ParAccel CEO Chuck Berger told me that ParAccel has now raised $73 million since 2005. The company hasn’t disclosed total funding for its last two rounds, but it had raised upward of $50 million as of its Series C round in 2009. That $22 million round followed a $20 million Series B round in 2007.

ParAccel makes a columnar (as opposed to the traditional row-based model for relational databases) database designed for fast analysis of large amounts of information. It’s similar in nature to those from Vertica, Greenplum, Netezza and Aster Data, all of which were recently acquired to fill big data holes within HP, EMC, IBM and s, respectively. We profiled ParAccel in March after the acquisition frenzy died down.

Berger wouldn’t comment further on the relationship between ParAccel and new investor Amazon, except to say that Amazon sees significant value in what ParAccel does. What that means is anybody’s guess, but between its retail business and its Amazon Web Services cloud computing business, there are plenty of opportunities for Amazon to run and find value in an advanced analytic technology like ParAccel.

Berger said his company has been growing like mad, especially in terms of revenue. In March, he cited between 30 and 40 customers, and this week, he told me ParAccel expects to have almost $20 million in revenue this year compared with between $4 million and $5 million last year.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Nazir Amin.

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As more and more providers build databases specifically designed for the cloud, there are issues that crop up. Razi Sharir, CEO, Xeround said despite the on-demand nature of cloud computing, the promise of tapping additional machines isn’t always there when dealing with other cloud providers. That’s the danger of relying on public clouds, said Barry Zane, CTO of ParAccel, who noted that the hardware can be a step down from what he uses. Another issue is the ability to scale smoothly and elastically, said Jim Starkey, CTO of NimbusDB.

But the promise of cloud databases is growing and with it bigger opportunities, they said. Mike Miller, founder and chief scientist at Cloudant said cloud databases open up the opportunity to bring databases closer to edge client applications, opening upa a lot of opportunities for the kinds of applications people can build and run. Starkey said the biggest opportunity lies in building scalable services for the web while Zane said the killer application will be analytics as more companies look to better leverage their data.

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