Hitachi Vantara To Acquire Waterline Data

Hitachi Vantara, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., intends to acquire the business of privately held Waterline Data, Inc.

Headquartered in Mountain View, CA, it provides intelligent data cataloging solutions for DataOps that help customers more easily gain actionable insights from large datasets and comply with data regulations such as GDPR. It delivers catalog technology enabled by ML that automates metadata discovery to solve modern data challenges for analytics and governance across edge-to-core-to-cloud environments.

Its technology has been adopted by customers in the financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals industries to support analytics and data science projects, pinpoint compliance-sensitive data and improve data governance.

It can be applied on-premises or in the cloud to large volumes of data in Hadoop, SQL, (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud environments.

Waterline Data’s patented “fingerprinting” technology is the cornerstone of its solutions, removing a big obstacle to data lake success. Fingerprinting uses AI- and rule-based systems to automate the discovery, classification and analysis of distributed and diverse data assets to accurately and efficiently tag large volumes of data based on common characteristics.

For example, to correctly identify “insurance claim numbers” in a petabyte-scale data lake, Waterline Data requires a single field to be identified as a claim number. The technology then generates a unique “fingerprint,” which enables it to recognize and label all similar fields as “insurance claim numbers” across the entire data lake and beyond with extremely high precision – regardless of file formats, field names or data sources. This makes the discovery of valuable insights from data much easier.

Integrating Waterline Data technology with Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada Data Services portfolio will provide a common metadata framework to help customers break down data silos distributed across the cloud, the data center, and the machines and devices at the edges of their networks. By applying DataOps methodologies to the unified datasets, customers can more rapidly gain insights and drive innovation.

“Our research illustrates that almost half of enterprise data practitioners are spending more than 50% of their time simply trying to find and prepare data for analysis. Data catalog products have emerged in recent years as strategic imperatives for enterprises seeking to address this challenge while also improving data governance,” said Matt Aslett, research VP, 451 Research. “This acquisition is logical and strategic: Waterline Data’s capabilities are a complementary fit for Hitachi Vantara and its Lumada Data Services portfolio. Adding Waterline Data furthers the company’s ability to address growing demand for products and services that deliver more agile and automated approaches to data management via DataOps: helping enterprise consumers of data ultimately leverage information in a fluid, yet governed way.”

“Hitachi Vantara provides customers with the digital building blocks, DataOps approaches and industry solutions they need to transform their organizations through data-driven insights,” said Brad Surak, president, digital solutions, Hitachi Vantara. “Waterline Data technologies complement Hitachi Vantara’s DataOps expertise and will become key offerings in the Lumada Data Services portfolio, bringing our customers greater visibility, tighter quality control, improved compliance and better management of their data.”

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition of Waterline Data is subject to customary closing conditions and it is expected to close in Hitachi’s 4FQ19, ending March 31, 2020.

Availability
Upon completion of the acquisition, Hitachi Vantara will make Waterline Data technologies available as standalone solutions as well as integrated components of the Lumada Data Services portfolio.

Resources:
Blog post, How the Acquisition of Waterline Data Will Help Hitachi Vantara Scale Your Digital Advantage by Brad Surak, president, digital solutions (January 22, 2020)
Press release, New Hitachi Vantara To Create Digital Competitive Edge for Transforming Enterprises (January 6 , 2020)