Hitachi Vantara Announces Intent to Acquire Waterline Data

Hitachi Vantara, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., announced its intent to acquire the business of privately held Waterline Data, Inc.

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, Waterline Data provides intelligent data cataloging solutions for DataOps that help customers more easily gain actionable insights from large datasets and comply with data regulations, such as GDPR.  Waterline Data delivers catalog technology enabled by machine learning (ML) that automates metadata discovery to solve modern data challenges for analytics and governance across edge-to-core-to-cloud environments.  Waterline Data’s technology has been adopted by customers in the financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals industries to support analytics and data science projects, pinpoint compliance-sensitive data and improve data governance.  It can be applied on-premises or in the cloud to large volumes of data in Hadoop, SQL, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud environments.

Waterline Data’s patented “fingerprinting” technology is the cornerstone of its solutions, removing one of the biggest obstacles to data lake success.  Fingerprinting uses AI- and rule-based systems to automate the discovery, classification and analysis of distributed and diverse data assets to accurately and efficiently tag large volumes of data based on common characteristics.

For example, to correctly identify “insurance claim numbers” in a petabyte-scale data lake, Waterline Data requires only a single field to be identified as a claim number.  The technology then generates a unique "fingerprint," which enables it to recognize and label all similar fields as “insurance claim numbers” across the entire data lake and beyond with extremely high precision – regardless of file formats, field names or data sources.  This makes the discovery of valuable insights from data much easier.

Integrating Waterline Data technology with Hitachi Vantara’s Lumada Data Services portfolio will provide a common metadata framework to help customers break down data silos distributed across the cloud, the data center, and the machines and devices at the edges of their networks.  By applying DataOps methodologies to the unified datasets, customers can more rapidly gain insights and drive innovation.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.  The acquisition of Waterline Data is subject to customary closing conditions and it is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Hitachi’s fiscal year 2019 (ending March 31, 2020).