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May 22, 2018

Google Cloud Adds Cask Data

Leading cloud providers continue to snap up analytics startups with an eye toward expanding access to big data technologies. Cask Data, developers of an application platform that among other things integrates Hadoop and Apache Spark, is the latest acquisition by Google Cloud, which earlier this month bought cloud migration specialist Velostrata.

Cask Data, Palo Alto, Calif., has worked closely with Google Cloud Platform since its founding in 2011 on integration projects. The latest was a collaboration to integrate the Cask Data Application Platform with the search giant (NASDAQ: GOOGL) to build a data lake in its cloud. The collaboration included integration of the startup’s data pipeline with Google cloud storage.

As with a growing list of cloud-based big data initiatives, the partners said the combination of cloud resources and Cask’s open source analytics tools would allow users to shift their focus from infrastructure provisioning to data analytics projects.

The deal also represents another step in Google’s strategy to boost its public cloud offerings, this time focused squarely on expanding its analytics capabilities.

Cask Data’s application platform proved attractive to Google in part due to its ability to integrate Hadoop with more agile analytics tools like Apache Spark. In releasing a new version of its application platform in 2016, Jonathan Gray, co-founder and CEO of Cask Data, told Datanami the startup’s mission was to help customers confront the challenges of big data application integration by overcoming the fundamental complexity of the Hadoop technology stack.

Among other tools, Cask’s big data integration platform includes plug-ins for connecting to big data sources such as databases and the Amazon Redshift data warehouse. Among the cloud and analytics partners listed as part of its platform architecture was Google cloud.

While Cask has previously emphasized on-premise deployments, the broad adoption of cloud infrastructure for enterprise data lakes, analytics and machine learning “led to a major shift in our strategy toward cloud,” Gray and company co-founder Nitin Motgi noted in a blog postannouncing the acquisition.

“We wanted to accelerate the big data industry with a standardization and simplification layer that allowed portability across diverse environments, usability across diverse groups of users and the security and governance needed in the enterprise,” added the Cask co-founders.

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