Pivotal, the company accelerating digital transformation for enterprises, today announced that it has acquired Quickstep Technologies, LLC. Quickstep – led by a team of developers from the University of Wisconsin – has developed a next-generation relational data processing engine that will form the next-generation of query processing in Pivotal’s Big Data Suite. The acquisition is an all-cash transaction. Other terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Quickstep’s technology, which was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, is expected to deliver efficient and sustainable data processing performance on current and future hardware. The Quickstep query execution engine incorporates a technology called Bitweaving designed to allow software to be in lock-step, as well as to exploit, advances in hardware utilization and optimization. Delivering a completely new query execution framework for Pivotal Greenplum Database and Pivotal HAWQ, it is expected to provide orders of magnitude increase in performance for advanced analytics, machine learning, and advanced data science use cases.
Jignesh Patel, the founder of Quickstep and a Professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, will join Pivotal. Professor Patel has worked in the area of database systems and big data for over two decades and has seen his research ideas transition to actual products many times over. His thesis work was acquired and commercialized by NCR/Teradata in the late 1990s. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Locomatix, which became part of Twitter in 2013. He is currently on the board of directors of global apparel and lifestyle company Lands’ End, Inc.
In conjunction with the acquisition of Quickstep, Pivotal also licensed technology from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF). WARF helps steward the cycle of research, discovery, commercialization and investment for the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Founded in 1925 by Professor Harry Steenbock as an independent, nonprofit foundation, WARF manages more than 1,600 active patents and an endowment of $2.7 billion as it funds university research, obtains patents for campus discoveries and licenses inventions to industry. For more information, visit warf.org.
