Alibaba Acquires Startup Data Artisans for $103M

A Berlin-based startup, Alibaba has paid 90 million Euro ($103 million) to accumulate Knowledge Artisans, that gives distributed methods and large-scale knowledge streaming providers for enterprises. The deal was first introduced by European media, including European Startups, earlier than being confirmed by each Alibaba and Data Artisans through weblog posts. In 2014, Knowledge Artisans was based by the staff main the event of Apache Flink, an open source stream processing framework developed by the Apache Software Foundation.The startup provides its personal data management platform, with open supply Apache Flink and Software Supervisor, to enterprise clients that embrace Uber, ING, Netflix, and Alibaba itself.

Alibaba Journey With Artisans

Since 2016 The Chinese language e-commerce big has been working with Knowledge Artisans, by way of help and open supply work to assist the structure and efficiency of the software program, each corporation stated in statements. Knowledge Artisans is on report as elevating $6.5 million over two rounds, most recently a Series A in 2016 led by Intel Capital; however there was a seemingly unannounced Collection B which closed final year and it appears like Alibaba was concerned, in accordance with a blog post from Knowledge Artisans co-founders Kostas Tzoumas and Stephan Ewen.

Data Artisans And Alibaba To Accelerate Contributions

Now Alibaba’s possession, and also you would additionally presume, assets which may help the enterprise attain new horizons with its open supply know-how, together with strikes to broaden to new areas that we now have not explored up to now and be sure that Flink turns into an extra useful knowledge processing framework for the fashionable data-driven, real-time enterprise.Moving forward together the data Artisans and Alibaba will not only continue but accelerate contributions to Apache Flink and open source Big Data Tzoumas and Ewen added, explaining that Alibaba is one of Flinks biggest users and also contributors to the community. Alibaba has committed to providing its own in-house developments to Flink, which it calls Blink to the community because of to mark the new era.

By leveraging the technological expertise of both teams and shared passion to develop the open-source community, we are confident that this strategic tie-in will further strengthen the growth of the Flink community, accelerate the data-processing technologies associate degreed facilitate bolster an open, cooperative and constructive setting for international developers who square measure keen about stream process and sanctioning period of time applications for modern enterprises,said Jingren Zhou, vice president of Alibaba Group, in a statement.

The deal is reminiscent Alibabas 2017 investment in MariaDB, an open source startup known for offering the most popular alternative to MySQL, a database management system. While not a full acquisition, the partnership has seen the two companies work together on new products for the community, and that is also the goal here.

Tzoumas and Ewen wrote in the announcement blog post Especially at times when many open source technologies and companies decide on a less collaborative and more closed approach, it is with great pleasure to see Alibaba committed to open source and our mission, eager to take Flinks technological advancement to the next level.

Moving into open source and infrastructure tech makes sensible for Alibaba, which is best known for e-commerce but also operates a cloud business, streaming services and more. With a net profit of $2.66 billion on revenue of $12.4 billion in its half-moon of business, the Chinese company definitely has lots of money to pursue the strategy.

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Alibaba vice president, Zhou, responded to two questions from Techcrunch.

• When asked- Why Alibaba pursued an acquisition rather than a continued partnership or investment he answered: We are confident in our joined capabilities to contribute even more to Flink, both in terms of technology and community development. It is the shared vision and effective work relationship that brought the two teams together. We appreciate learning from each other and strive to make the data processing open source community more open, collaborative and diverse.
• Another question when asked How Alibaba would respond to concerns on how one of the worlds largest tech companies will use and respect the open source community, let alone a business headquartered in China to which Zhou replied: Since 2016, We have been a strong collaborator with data Artisans and we have always shared the same passion to use open-source stream processing framework to unify real-time event-driven applications and real-time analytics.

From a technology point of view, this is something really exciting for developers across the globe, who is working very hard on an easy stream processing for everyone. For our customers and partners, our joining forces with data Artisans presents an efficient option to the challenges that many enterprises are facing in the era of Digital Transformation, when real-time applications and analytics are often talked about in the boardroom but without a lot of vendor support on how to do it effectively, and in a scalable manner.