NetApp Scoops Up French Start-Up Data Mechanics
Managed platform provider for big data processing and cloud analytics to accelerate Spot roadmap
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on June 24, 2021 at 2:33 pmNetApp, Inc. has acquired Data Mechanics, a managed platform provider for big data processing and cloud analytics with offices in Paris, France, that helps businesses capitalize on Apache Spark, an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing and ML, in Kubernetes.
Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
At a time when on-premises and cloud enterprise data and application growth is exploding, use of analytics and ML to identify operating efficiencies, cost reductions, and automate manual processes so engineers can focus on more strategic tasks is a top priority – and a strategic imperative – for all enterprises.
“Now more than ever, our customers are adopting cloud-first and cloud native strategies that will enable them to be more agile and adaptable in the face of unprecedented data growth,” said Anthony Lye, senior VP and GM of NetApp’s public cloud services business unit. “Adding Data Mechanics to our existing solutions will make it simpler and more cost-effective for organizations across all industries to fully leverage Apache Spark and Kubernetes to advance their data and cloud initiatives.”
This acquisition comes less than a year after NetApp acquired Spot (now Spot by NetApp), a CloudOps provider that automates and optimizes workloads running in public cloud environments.
Data Mechanics’s team and IP will be integrated with the Spot by NetApp team and portfolio to accelerate the development of recently announced Spot Wave solution, which simplifies, optimizes and automates Spark workloads running in public clouds.
“Although there are significant benefits to moving analytics and application workloads to the cloud, managing analytics technologies and cloud infrastructure can be resource and time intensive, impeding employee productivity and ROI,” said Amiram Shachar, VP and GM of Spot by NetApp. “We’re excited to welcome Data Mechanics to Spot by NetApp as we further enable organizations to put their data to work and get even more value from their cloud infrastructure investments.”
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French firm born 2 years ago, Data Mechanics SASU (Société par actions simplifiée à associé unique) is a YCombinator-backed start-up with capital of €100,100, total funding amount being $150,000 in 2019 from 4 investors.
Co-founders are CEO Jean-Yves Stephan, CEO, former software engineer and Spark infrastructure team lead, and CTO Julien Dumazert, a passionate Spark user as a data scientist and data engineer at the ride-sharing BlaBlaCar platform, and the user analytics platform ContentSquare.
Data Mechanics designed a managed Apache Spark platform - a more developer-friendly and cost-effective alternative to services like Databricks, EMR, Dataproc, Azure HDInsight, etc. It is deployed on a Kubernetes cluster inside a cloud account (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
With Spot
The solution makes running Spark, a go-to open-source framework for big data, AI- and ML-based applications, easy and accessible on Kubernetes. With its capabilities integrated into the Ocean product family in Spot Wave, big data application owners will be able to run automated, optimized Spark on automated, optimized cloud infrastructure. While Data Mechanics technologies and team will be integrated into Spot Wave, Data Mechanics customers will continue to receive support, and will now get the expanded offering of Wave.
Pricing of Data Mechanics
Data Mechanics and Spot
NetApp probably didn't spend a lot of money to get the tiny start-up, not like Spot acquired for $450 million, as this time is was not obliged to reveal financial details of the transaction.
At the beginning a 100% hardware company with Ontap proprietary OS, NetApp is now more and more in software. It can also be proved when you can see below that all its acquisitions were in software since 2017.
Nevertheless, the public company is not a hungry buyer with a total of 25 acquisitions since inception in 1992, if you compare with former competitor EMC, buying a total of 85 companies from 1998 to 2018, before its acquisition by Dell.
All acquisitions of NetApp
| Mo. | Year | Acquired firm | Price in $ million | Business | |
| 7 | 2000 | Orca Systems | 71 | Virtual interface (VI) architecture | |
| 9 | 2000 | WebManage Technologies | 75 | WebManage writes software for caching Web pages | |
| 7 | 2003 | Auspex (patents of) | 9 | NAS | |
| 12 | 2003 | Spinnaker Networks | 306 | NAS and distributed file system | |
| 5 | 2005 | Alacritus | 11 | VTL software | |
| 7 | 2005 | Decru | 272 | Encryption/decryption appliance | |
| 11 | 2006 | Topio | 160 | Asynchronous replication to multiple locations | |
| 1 | 2008 | Onaro | 120 | Solutions management and control of storage networks (SRM) | |
| 4 | 2010 | Bycast | NA | Object-based storage software | |
| 1 | 2011 | Akorri | 60 | Software monitoring storage and server resources | |
| 3 | 2011 | LSI (Engenio) | 480 | Storage disk subsystems | |
| 11 | 2012 | Cache IQ | 100 | Intelligent caching solutions for file-based storage | |
| 2 | 2013 | ionGrid | NA | iOS solution to secure mobile access to enterprise content, applications and data behind firewall | |
| 10 | 2014 | Riverbed (assets) | 80 | SteelStore product line | |
| 1 | 2015 | HvNAS | NA | Small Australian independent developer of SMB 3/2 for Linux | |
| 12 | 2015 | SolidFire | 870 | All-flash system | |
| 5 | 2017 | Plexistor | NA | Software that turns off-the-shelf servers into high-performance converged infrastructure offerings with persistent memory technologies | |
| 5 | 2017 | Immersive Partner Solutions | NA | Cloud-based converged infrastructure monitoring and compliance | |
| 8 | 2017 | GreenQloud | NA | Iceland software company in Qstack hybrid cloud management software | |
| 9 | 2018 | StackPointCloud | NA | Multi-cloud Kubernetes control plane with cloud volumes to accelerate DevOps capabilities | |
| 5 | 2019 | Cognigo | 70 | Platform for data protection and adapting it to privacy regulations such as GDPR, using AI technology and natural language processing | |
| 3 | 2020 | Talon | NA | Software-defined storage solutions | |
| 4 | 2020 | CloudJumper | NA | Cloud software in VDI and remote desktop services | |
| 6 | 2020 | Spot | 450 | Software tools for visibility and automation that drive continuous optimization of workloads in single platform | |
| 6 | 2021 | Data Mechanics | NA | Big data processing and cloud analytics | |
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