SAP is acquiring Altiscale

Enterprise software company SAP is acquiring Altiscale, a startup that offers a cloud-based version of the Hadoop open source software for storing, processing, and analyzing lots of different kinds of data, VentureBeat has learned. News of the deal should be announced in the next few weeks.

The deal could be valued above $125 million. The investors are slated to receive three to four times as much money as they have put in, a source familiar with the matter told VentureBeat. The startup has raised at least $42 million in venture capital, including a $30 million round announced in December 2014. Investors include Accel Partners, AME Cloud Ventures, Northgate, General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital, and Wildcat Venture Partners.

SAP has taken steps to enhance its cloud software portfolio. This deal gives SAP one of the best known providers in the category called Hadoop as a service. Altiscale’s founder and chief executive, Raymie Stata, sold his company Stata Labs to Yahoo in 2004 and worked on the deployment of the Hadoop software within Yahoo. Stata and his team could be useful for SAP as competitors like IBM and Microsoft put a higher priority on cloud.

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