Microsoft announced that it intends to acquire DATAllegro, provider of breakthrough data warehouse appliances. The acquisition will extend the capabilities of Microsoft’s mission-critical data platform, making it easier and more cost effective for customers of all sizes to manage and glean insight from the ever expanding amount of data generated by and for businesses, employees and consumers.

“DATAllegro is a tremendously innovative company that has started to redefine the data warehouse market,” said Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft. “Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers enterprise-class capabilities in business intelligence and data warehousing and the addition of the DATAllegro team and their technology will take our data platform to the highest scale of data warehousing.”

“Integrating DATAllegro’s non-proprietary hardware platform and flexible software architecture into Microsoft SQL Server will provide customers with the strongest offering in the market,” said Stuart Frost, CEO of DATAllegro. “We are excited to join forces with Microsoft and continue the innovation this company was founded on.”

Unlike most data warehouse appliance vendors targeting the 1-25 terabyte range, DATAllegro has specialized in large volume, high performance data warehouses.  DATAllegro’s data warehouse appliance installations boast some of the largest data volume capacities in the industry – up to hundreds of terabytes on a single system. DATAllegro clients span such markets as retail, telecommunications and manufacturing. 

In addition to offering large capacities, DATAllegro’s patent-pending technology is designed for complex workloads including high concurrency and mixed queries. DATAllegro is one of the few data warehouse appliances built on a non-proprietary hardware platform including Dell and Bull servers and EMC storage. This flexible architecture makes it ideally suited to integrate with SQL Server.

This will no doubt position Microsoft to leapfrog Oracle at the high end of the database market.