Databricks, the United States-based data and artificial intelligence (AI) company, has on Tuesday announced it has agreed to acquire Arcion, a Databricks Ventures portfolio company that helps enterprises quickly and reliably replicate data across on-prem, cloud databases and data platforms, for $100 million.

This will enable Databricks to provide native solutions to ingest data from various databases and software as a service (SaaS) applications into the Databricks Lakehouse Platform, Databricks said in a statement.

According to the statement, data lakehouse platforms have emerged as the de facto standard for enterprise data and AI platforms. However, these data platforms are only as valuable as the data in them.

It said ingesting data from existing databases and applications remains complicated, fragile, and costly.

It also said troves of important data sit not only in transactional databases such as Oracle, MySQL, and Postgres, but also in SaaS applications such as Salesforce, SAP, and Workday.

Cited a recent MIT Technology Review Insights and Databricks survey of senior data and technology executives, it said businesses still suffer from many siloed systems.

Meanwhile, it said 34 percent have 10+ systems, and of the largest companies, more than 80 percent have 10+ systems to juggle.

Thus, it said this acquisition will enable Databricks to natively provide a scalable, easy-to-use, and cost-effective solution to ingest data from various enterprise data sources.

Building on a scalable change data capture (CDC) engine, it said Arcion offers connectors for over 20 enterprise databases and data warehouses.

It also said the integration will simplify ingesting such data either continuously or on-demand into the lakehouse, fully integrated with the enterprise security, governance, and compliance capabilities of the Databricks platform.

“To build analytical dashboards, data applications, and AI models, data needs to be replicated from the systems of record like CRM, ERP, and enterprise apps to the Lakehouse,” said Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Databricks.

“Arcion’s highly reliable and easy-to-use solution will enable our customers to make that data available almost instantly for faster and more informed decision-making,

“Arcion will be a great asset to Databricks, and we are excited to welcome the team and work with them to further develop solutions to help our customers accelerate their data and AI journeys,” he added.

Gary Hagmueller, Chief Executive Officer of Arcion, said that Arcion’s real-time, large-scale CDC data pipeline technology extends Databricks’ market-leading ETL solution to include replication of operational data in real-time.

“Databricks has been a great partner and investor in Arcion, and we are very excited to join forces to help companies simplify and accelerate their data and AI business momentum,” he added.

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