Alibaba has bought Berlin-based startup Data Artisans for a reported €90 million (£80 million) in a deal that will see the $39 billion (by 2017-2018 revenues) Chinese juggernaut take its in-house Apache Flink code developments open source.
Data Artisans was founded in 2014 by the creators of data stream processing engine Flink. It won Intel Capital funding for its Series A round in 2016 and appears to have also had Alibaba backing in an unreported Series B.
While the companies have both described the deal as a “deepened partnership” this morning, the number, as reported by EU-startups, has not yet been confirmed
The deal comes four months after the startup said it was making an industry-first technology available that allows for rapid, serialisable ACID transactions directly on streaming data; patents are pending. (The tool can be used to power applications that require real-time decisions on streaming data, for example in financial services).
Read this: ACID Breakthrough for data Artisans
Data Artisans founders Kostas Tzoumas and Stephan Ewen welcomed Alibaba’s commitment to open source in a blog post, saying the $39 billion (by 2017-2018 revenues) behemoth has already been contributing to data Artisans’ codebase.
“Especially at times when many open source technologies and companies decide on a less collaborative and more “closed” approach, it is with great pleasure to see Alibaba committed to open source and our mission” they wrote.
They added: “Alibaba, as one of the largest production users and biggest contributors to Apache Flink, in close collaboration with the open source community and data Artisans team, has made numerous contributions to the Flink codebase over the last 2 years… As a first step, Alibaba announced their commitment to contribute their in-house developments around Flink — Blink — to the open source community.”
Alibaba data Artisans Already Working Together…
Alibaba said it has been working with the Flink community improve the architecture and performance of the software to meet the stream-processing demands of enterprises worldwide since 2017: “The deepening of the partnership was a natural next step for the companies as they continued their work around Apache Flink”.
The global streaming analytics market is projected to reach $47.75 billion by 2025, growing at 34.98 percent from 2017 to 2025, according to MarketInsightsReports, and data Artisans’ tools allow users to implement stream processing for a completely new class of applications that previously relied on relational database management systems.
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