Apple acquires big data analytics firm Acunu
Apple appears to have acquired London-based big data analytics firm Acunu, which previously marketed an eponymous real-time analytics platform that boasted high-velocity ingests and compatibility with Cassandra databases.
Acunu Analytics dashboard.
A preponderance of evidence suggests Apple performed an "acqui-hire" of key Acunu employees in late 2013, though an exact timeline is currently unknown. From the end of 2013, and moving into early 2014, at least seven software engineers, including founding CEO and CTO Tim Moreton, left Acunu and are now working for Apple in some capacity.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Moreton uprooted from the UK and is now serving as an iCloud manager in San Francisco. He left Acunu in December 2013.
Former Acunu chief product officer and head engineering Andrew Byde left the firm in January 2014 and is currently a senior software engineer working out of Apple's London offices. On his LinkedIn bio, Byde says his current position "involves "Big Data" at the largest scale -- high quality reliable scalable engineering."
Other former Acunu employees now working at Apple include software engineers Richard Low, Nicolas Favre-Felix, and Sam Overton. Tellingly, Overton is continuing work with distributed systems at Apple and is involved in the "development of highly available distributed systems for structured storage." Another software engineer left Acunu for Apple in December 2013 before moving on to Google.
Grzegorz Milos left his seat as Acunu's kernel team lead in early 2013 and entered Apple in December 2014 as an iCloud engineer focusing on CloudKit technology. Another former Acunu kernel engineer just joined Apple in February as part of the iCloud team.
In addition to the mass employee migration, UK executive agency Companies House London lists Acunu as registered to 100 New Bridge Street in London, the official registered address of Apple Europe. This same address was used to register Camel Audio when Apple took control of the digital instrument effects developer in February.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bloomberg reported on the purchase earlier today.
Acunu started life in 2009 with founding talent made up of researchers and engineers from Cambridge University and Oxford University. Although Acunu's website is no longer in service, a cached snapshot from August 2014 still exists on the Web. As the firm described itself at the time:
The company also worked in the telecommunications industry, helping telcos parse telemetry data like call detail records.
While it was still available, Acunu Analytics provided realtime, incremental analytics by processing events and SQL-like queries into C* operations. Results were visualized on Acunu's dashboard software, while original data remained compatible with Cassandra NoSQL databases and Hadoop distributed processing.
How Apple integrated Acunu's technology into its own services like iCloud is not yet clear, though it likely resides as a backend analytics system for the company's constantly growing content network. Along with Beats Music and iTunes Radio, Apple is rumored to roll out an over-the-top streaming TV service this fall.
While Acunu likely changed hands more than a year ago, today's news represents the second Apple acquisition to come to light in so many days. On Tuesday it was reported that Apple purchased database software company FoundationDB in a move thought to bolster iTunes media content distribution.
Apple has ramped up mergers and acquisitions operations in Europe, and most recently assimilated music analytics startup Semetric in January.
Acunu Analytics dashboard.
A preponderance of evidence suggests Apple performed an "acqui-hire" of key Acunu employees in late 2013, though an exact timeline is currently unknown. From the end of 2013, and moving into early 2014, at least seven software engineers, including founding CEO and CTO Tim Moreton, left Acunu and are now working for Apple in some capacity.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Moreton uprooted from the UK and is now serving as an iCloud manager in San Francisco. He left Acunu in December 2013.
Former Acunu chief product officer and head engineering Andrew Byde left the firm in January 2014 and is currently a senior software engineer working out of Apple's London offices. On his LinkedIn bio, Byde says his current position "involves "Big Data" at the largest scale -- high quality reliable scalable engineering."
Other former Acunu employees now working at Apple include software engineers Richard Low, Nicolas Favre-Felix, and Sam Overton. Tellingly, Overton is continuing work with distributed systems at Apple and is involved in the "development of highly available distributed systems for structured storage." Another software engineer left Acunu for Apple in December 2013 before moving on to Google.
Grzegorz Milos left his seat as Acunu's kernel team lead in early 2013 and entered Apple in December 2014 as an iCloud engineer focusing on CloudKit technology. Another former Acunu kernel engineer just joined Apple in February as part of the iCloud team.
In addition to the mass employee migration, UK executive agency Companies House London lists Acunu as registered to 100 New Bridge Street in London, the official registered address of Apple Europe. This same address was used to register Camel Audio when Apple took control of the digital instrument effects developer in February.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Bloomberg reported on the purchase earlier today.
Acunu started life in 2009 with founding talent made up of researchers and engineers from Cambridge University and Oxford University. Although Acunu's website is no longer in service, a cached snapshot from August 2014 still exists on the Web. As the firm described itself at the time:
During an interview published by Planet Cassandra in 2013, Moreton revealed that Acunu worked with banks that collect financial market data to understand activity patterns in trading environments. Among the firm's duties was spotting anomalies and performing risk analysis.Acunu Analytics offers low latency analytics, powering dashboards and embedded applications for infrastructure monitoring, web analytics, IoT and other high arrival rate applications. Wherever high velocity data in motion must be analyzed immediately, Acunu Analytics delivers powerful operational intelligence.
The company also worked in the telecommunications industry, helping telcos parse telemetry data like call detail records.
While it was still available, Acunu Analytics provided realtime, incremental analytics by processing events and SQL-like queries into C* operations. Results were visualized on Acunu's dashboard software, while original data remained compatible with Cassandra NoSQL databases and Hadoop distributed processing.
How Apple integrated Acunu's technology into its own services like iCloud is not yet clear, though it likely resides as a backend analytics system for the company's constantly growing content network. Along with Beats Music and iTunes Radio, Apple is rumored to roll out an over-the-top streaming TV service this fall.
While Acunu likely changed hands more than a year ago, today's news represents the second Apple acquisition to come to light in so many days. On Tuesday it was reported that Apple purchased database software company FoundationDB in a move thought to bolster iTunes media content distribution.
Apple has ramped up mergers and acquisitions operations in Europe, and most recently assimilated music analytics startup Semetric in January.
Comments
Weren't they outlawed by the Geneva Convention?
I haven't the first clue as to what Apple are planning, but this, along with the database tech acquisition announced earlier, seems to make for some very interesting bedfellows.
High-velocity ingests?
Weren't they outlawed by the Geneva Convention?
Slow down; chew your food.
Now we know one of the reasons Apple bought FoundationDB.
Cassandra DB will be replaced by FoundationDB for sure.
I hope Apple releases some form of CoreData/FoundationDB at WWDC.
Time will tell.
"Apple appears to have acquired London-based big data analytics firm Acunu, which previously marketed an eponymous real-time analytics platform that boasted high-velocity ingests and compatibility with Cassandra databases."
I see words that I know, but I still don't understand this at all. ;-)
Quote:
I see words that I know, but I still don't understand this at all. ;-)
Data ingestion is the process of obtaining, importing, and processing data for later use or storage in a database. This process often involves altering individual files by editing their content and/or formatting them to fit into a larger document.
An effective data ingestion methodology begins by validating the individual files, then prioritizes the sources for optimum processing, and finally validates the results. When numerous data sources exist in diverse formats (the sources may number in the hundreds and the formats in the dozens), maintaining reasonable speed and efficiency can become a major challenge. To that end, several vendors offer programs tailored to the task of data ingestion in specific applications or environments.
As of 2014 Apple had 75,000 Cassandra nodes across multiple clusters.
Language has its own Internal parsing, statistics an indexing. For instance, there are two sentences:
a) %u2018Fire!%u2019
b) %u2018In this amazing city of Rome some people sometimes may cry in agony: %u2018Fire!%u2019%u2019
Evidently, that the phrase %u2018Fire!%u2019 has different importance into both sentences, in regard to extra information in both. This distinction is reflected as the phrase weights: the first has 1, the second %u2013 0.12; the greater weight signifies stronger emotional %u2018acuteness%u2019.
First you need to parse obtaining phrases from clauses, for sentences and paragraphs. Next, you calculate Internal statistics, weights; where the weight refers to the frequency that a context phrase occurs in relation to other context phrases.
After that, you index each word from each phrase by dictionary, annotate it by subtexts.
Isn't that foie gras?