Carlyle Group Acquires Novetta

Privately held Novetta, a provider of an analytics platform designed to help clients sift through huge datasets never intended for analysis together, said it has been sold to the Carlyle Group.

Arlington Capital Partners announced the deal to sell Novetta to the Washington, DC-based asset manager on Aug. 27. Novetta, McLean, Va., is best known for its cyber analytic offerings. It moved earlier this year to broaden its reach into the commercial market with a Hadoop-based solution called Novetta Entity Analytics.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The dealmakers did say equity capital for the transaction would come from Carlyle Partners VI, a $13 billion buyout fund. The transaction is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close later this year.

Novetta’s primary focus is intelligence, military and homeland security markets, although it continues to make inroads in the commercial market to help customers “master scale and speed in dealing with massive data sets,” the company said. Security customers use its analytics platform for threat and fraud detection, to protect sensitive networks as well as for enterprise analytics.

Ian Fujiyama, the Carlyle managing director who led the transaction, added in a statement that it would seek to expand Novetta’s “core government business and ongoing expansion into commercial enterprises.” Fujiyama also noted the analytic firm’s investments in “data and cyber analytics, open source intelligence and [multiple intelligence] data fusion.”

Novetta’s primary software platform, Wareman Pro, works by partitioning data out across a cluster based on so-called strategy rules, which is the equivalent of a mapping job. Depending on the data attributes, another set of rules de-conflict and analyze the data using thresholds.

Wareman Pro has been widely adopted by U.S. agencies to crunch large datasets. When Cloudera began gaining traction several years ago with commercial Hadoop, a previous incarnation of Novetta called White Oak exited the business of building and maintaining parallel architectures, instead porting the software to run under CDH version 3, although some government customers continue to run Wareman Pro version 1. It is currently certified on several Hadoop distributions.

Earlier this year, Novetta rolled out to the commercial sector its Entity Analytics platform designed to provide context to unstructured data about people, organizations, location and events. It is also intended to address the growing volume and variety of data in Hadoop, the company said. It runs natively on Hadoop.

The company stressed that its analytics platform can be used to uncover relationships among entities such as family relationships, organization hierarchies and affiliations as well as undisclosed relationships between employees and suppliers and how products are connected to consumers.

Carlyle Group said it would continue to invest in Novetta’s technology development while seeking other “complementary acquisitions.” The asset manager dominates the federal market and in one of the world’s largest private equity investors.

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