
Alibaba acquires Berlin-based data Artisans for $103M - keramba
https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/alibaba-acquires-berlin-based-data-artisans-for-103m-report-116452/
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jamesblonde
Great product. It should have happened last week, then we truly could have
said that all Enterprise Apache Open Software products died of the AWS plague
in 2018: Hadoop is gone with Cloudera/Hortonworks merging, Kafka with
Confluent's new license covering their ecosystem of tooling. Databricks now
have their own Spark runtime, which will get more TLC than Apache Spark. On
top of Apache, Mongo, Neo4J, Redis Labs abandoning open-source. Wow, just wow.

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sewen
Sorry, but that is not correct.

We clearly say in all announcements that this is about doubling down on open
source. In contrast to all current the efforts everywhere that restrict open
use, we plan to do even more work openly.

This is best thing that could have happened to any open source project. And to
any founder whose heart beats for technology and open source...

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jamesblonde
Aha, i see why you downvoted me. You were actually serious. I literally
thought this was a generic tongue-in-cheek ironic comment made for the purpose
of comedy. That's why it made me smile. That it's not ironic is even funnier.

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scarejunba
You can’t downvote people who respond to you on HN, at least at his karma
level. In fact, he couldn’t have downvoted you because he has too little
karma.

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jamesblonde
What is it about European Enterprise Data software companies that they never
make it past this stage without either being bought up or moving to the
States?

MySQL, JBoss, Elastic. The list is much longer.

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tormeh
EU capital markets are underdeveloped compared to those in the US. European
banks are too small, and mostly national. More importantly, the marketplaces
are too small and too national. European stock exchanges are a joke compared
to NASDAQ and NYSE.

There's also the small detail of pension funds generally being forbidden from
investing in stocks. That's the money that's fuelling SV, if my impression is
correct. This policy comes from a general risk-aversion that's also evident in
all other areas.

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ionised
None of this seems correct.

Europe has more than a few multi-national, global banks.

Also, my own pension is invested in the stock market. That's the norm for
employer-provided pensions.

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athrun
This article from The Economist touches on this topic.

“Banks cannot use deposits in one country to lend in another, because national
regulators do not want to be on the hook for loans to improvident foreigners.
An eu-wide deposit-guarantee scheme would allay that fear, but has yet to be
agreed.”

[https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/05/the-euro-
enter...](https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/01/05/the-euro-enters-its-
third-decade-in-need-of-reform)

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lawrenceyan
I wonder what it would take to create the set of conditions for another
"Silicon Valley / SF Bay Area" to appear in Europe. It seems like inevitably,
any tech companies that are successful always end up getting bought out and
leave to the U.S. instead of staying.

What are the primary issues? Lack of VC funding, culture, government policy?
On the surface, it doesn't seem like there's anything particularly lacking, at
least from my superficial understanding as an American viewing in from the
outside.

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Rainymood
It's attitude and sheer luck. People in the US seem to take more risk, this
leads to huge rewards (start-ups) but also leads to an insane amount of
inequality in wealth. I have never seen more in-your-face wealth inequality
than in America (and yes, I've been to China and Asia in general quite often).
Then a second component is the sheer amount of people trying their luck.
Imagine that winning in a startup is like tossing a coin with a p=1e-7
probability of landing on "win". The Netherlands has 2.000.000 people aged
20-30 and the US has 40.000.000 people aged 20-30. Imagine that all these
people start a startup we have a probability of P(X>0) with n=2.000.000,
p=1e-7 is given by 0.18 and the probability for P(X>0) with n=40.000.000,
p=1e-7 is 0.98. The point I'm trying to make is that a lot or more people in
the US try to start something, this leads to many more failures, but also to
some singular huge successes.

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lawrenceyan
Doesn't the European Union have around 500 million people though in it's
population? America is only like 325 million people I think.

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oblio
Those 500 million are on average quite a bit poorer than the average American
(regarding disposable income and therefore the willingness to risk a long
period of 0 income to start a business). Especially in the Eastern part.
Mississippi (!) has higher GDP per capita than most EU countries.

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mkaufmann
I've been following data Artisans for a while and love their tech! It seemed
that being not from silicon valley made it more difficult for them to gain
traction.

One part of the acquisition is the integration of Alibaba's in-house
modifications called Blink. It will be interesting to see what is behind that.
To me it looks like this could be a very health collaboration.

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statictype
Why did they make this acquisition? It looks like data Artisans provides tools
for managing Apache Fink deployments. Is it more than that?

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jamesblonde
It's an aqui-hire, i guess. Not great for Data Artisans customers. Alibaba are
flexing their muscles. Google have their own data platform. We want to show we
have our own too - they see it as competitive advantage. Alibaba are not an
enterprise software company, like Data Artisans were.

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TheSpiceIsLife
Doesn’t Alibaba offer services similar to AWS?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Cloud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alibaba_Cloud)

Unless I misunderstand what is meant by _enterprise software_? I’m just a
tradesman, mostly, so that’s quite possible.

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jamesblonde
An enterprise vendor would have been oracle or red hat who kept flink
available and for sale on a clouds and on-premise. I can only buy assume flink
will become an alibaba only managed service. Why else would they buy it?

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knbknb
Software Engineering Radio has recently (Nov.2018) released an 1 hour long
interview with Stephan Ewen, CTO of data Artisans: [http://www.se-
radio.net/2018/11/se-radio-episode-346-stephan...](http://www.se-
radio.net/2018/11/se-radio-episode-346-stephan-ewen-on-streaming-
architecture/)

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theredbox
Europeans will become a cheap labor in the next 50 years for Chinese and
American conglomerates.

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expertentipp
They already are for American, and Chinese entering the market might actually
introduce some fresh air to the stuffy atmosphere created by being at the
absolute bottom of the American corporate outsourcing chain. Except in Germany
and France - there they are cheap labour for domestic conglomerates.

