Datapipe Acquires GoGrid To Ramp Up Big Data Managed Services Offerings

Datapipe is making moves to establish itself as a leading big data managed service provider with the acquisition of GoGrid, company executives said.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

GoGrid is a multicloud big data deployment company, offering a one-button deployment option for big data solutions across a variety of cloud environments. Big data solutions can be automated and rolled out to a variety of public and private cloud platforms, then scaled up to develop full-scale production environments.

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Those technical capabilities will allow Datapipe to spin up purpose-built environments quickly at a small scale or more easily at a larger scale across multiple cloud environments, Datapipe CMO Craig Sowell said. The GoGrid tools will add big data deployment, orchestration and management solutions directly into the current managed services offerings.

"It's really about Datapipe being part of the client's journey to the cloud through big data and helping them manage that full lifecycle," Sowell said. "That's very exciting for us."

Datapipe will take the solution to market as part of the Jersey City, N.J.-based company's managed services. Sowell compared the go-to-market strategy to Datapipe's acquisition of Newvem in 2013, which added cloud analytics capabilities to the company's managed services portfolio. Just as with the previous acquisition, the GoGrid tools will "become seamless" to the Datapipe clients, Sowell said, instead of being "silos of capabilities."

"They come to us because they want this stuff integrated ... We spend a lot of time integrating these things to the client, into a single pane of glass, integrated environments so they can leverage this [technology]," Sowell said.

The acquisition comes as more and more clients want to leverage big data. Clients are generating key data from the Internet of Things, connected devices and mobile applications and are now looking to "aggressively" take advantage of that information, particularly through cloud technologies.

Sowell said Datapipe prides itself on staying ahead of the curve, and he "absolutely" believes that big data is the next big opportunity for managed service providers.

"It's such a powerful use case of cloud and as clients have moved beyond what I'll call the simple workloads that have moved to the cloud. Now, confidence has grown, the value of cloud-based services is clear, and the clients are looking to get the power of the cloud to work and big data, we think, is exactly in that sweet spot," Sowell said.

Going forward, Datapipe plans to just "keep doing what we're doing," he said.

"We are really fortunately positioned to just have a great set of capabilities, a solid base of customers, a global presence and now a full, really powerful, big data suite and we're just focused on delivering that value to our clients. That's our strategy -- the more value to our clients, the more our business grows," Sowell said. "I just couldn't be more excited about it."

PUBLISHED JAN. 20, 2015