Apple Secretly Acquires Big Data Firm Acunu

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Apple’s recently publicised FoundationDB acquisition followed an earlier purchase of UK-based big data analytics company Acunu Ltd., reports Bloomberg. Actually, rumours of Apple acquiring Acunu surfaced last year in April, when Bloor analyst Philip Howard pointed to changes the company had gone through: The chairman and five other directors had left the company, and another director – from Novauris Technologies – had been appointed. It’s an open secret that Novauris was acquired by Apple in October 2013.

In other words, this acquisition is not new. Instead, it was brought into the spotlight just yesterday by Bloomberg. What the Acunu and FoundationDB purchases reveal is that “Apple is placing more emphasis on the development of solid data infrastructure to help provide services to its legions of global consumers beyond iPhones and iPads”, writes Bloomberg.

Acunu was originally a Cassandra distributor – a database used by Apple on 75,000 nodes storing over 10 PB of data (followed by Netflix with 2,500 nodes storing 420 TB and handling more than a trillion requests per day) – but more recently it became the provider of Acunu Analytics.

As it turns out, Acunu’s Chief Technology Officer, Tim Moreton, joined Apple’s iCloud division in Cupertino, California, in December 2013.

It is still unclear how or if the Acunu technology can be integrated with that of FoundationDB.

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