Microsoft purchasing DATAllegro

On Thursday, July 24th, Microsoft and DATAllegro announced that Microsoft will purchase DATAllegro, one of the earlier data warehouse appliance startups. I arrived at home early this week to catch up with news in the States after a 10 day stint in Estonia working with High School students, and was intreagued with this news coming from the technology world.

My amateur first thoughts on this aquisition:

1.) From knowing how DATAllegro has chosen to go to market in the past year and a half, this purchase may make the most sense for Microsoft. DATAllegro's V3 appliance was the first major DW appliance product to significantly leverage third party hardware to move the market toward more of an open platform. Most (if not all) of the other major players in this space leverage a proprietary hardware platform for their solutions. Microsoft, not being in the server business, should be able to leverage and expand upon the DATAllegro partnerships for product development as they evolve the software and database components of this solution.

2.) While the final evolution of the Microsoft-DATAllegro purchase may be unknown, I imagine that Microsoft will be working over the next months to integrate their existing BI applications and development framework into the newly purchased appliance solution. This could be a huge win for companies that are looking to leverage skill sets from their application development groups into their BI initiatives. Adding Microsoft's vast development network of Professional Services firms to that mix will provide more incentives for companies to look at Microsoft as a contender. Time will tell whether they will deliver on these aspects of their brand in regards to Enterprise intelligence... be on the lookout. If Microsoft is able to fully integrate their existing solutions and .NET (including Excel and Access... still the leading BI tools used in the market) to the DWA platform, they should have a compelling value proposition especially for mid market companies that need rapid deployment and quick ROI wins to justify projects.

3.) This move further solidifies the data warehouse appliance's position in the Business Intelligence market. Microsoft would be the third major vendor to market an appliance product (HP's Neoview and the Teradata's 2500 being the others), which provides evidence to the market that these solutions are here to stay and have support. This should help Netezza's positioning as well as they were the first player in this market space and have a lot of mind share where data warehouse appliances are concerned.

4.) If successful, could this speed the rise of the open hardware platform in Business Intelligence? There are solutions out there today (Oracle's data warehouse platform being one of them), but the jury is still out as to whether they can economically scale. When the ability to economically scale data warehouses on commodity platforms is found, it should be game changing (in the same way that Netezza's first appliance changed the EDW game).

I'm interested to hear your thoughts.