DATAllegro

About DATAllegro

DATAllegro emerged in 2003 as a specialized provider of data warehouse appliances, founded by Stuart Frost and Mark Thacker in Aliso Viejo, California. Stuart Frost, a graduate of Nottingham University in Electronic and Computer Engineering and a serial entrepreneur, had previously founded SELECT Software Tools, which he led to a NASDAQ IPO. His experience in creating successful tech companies informed DATAllegro's direction, positioning it as a competitor to Netezza, another pioneer in the data warehouse appliance market.

The company's core business centered on designing and marketing data warehouse appliances built to manage exceptionally large volumes of data, scaling up to hundreds of terabytes on a single system. This capability addressed a critical need for large enterprises, particularly in data-intensive sectors like retail, telecommunications, and manufacturing. DATAllegro's business model involved selling these complete appliances, which combined its proprietary, patent-pending software with non-proprietary hardware from industry leaders like Dell, Bull, and EMC. This open platform approach offered clients greater flexibility and scalability compared to first-generation appliances.

The product was a massively parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse appliance that utilized an open-source software stack, including the Ingres database management system running on Linux. A key feature was its ability to handle complex workloads involving high concurrency and mixed queries, enabling companies to enhance their business intelligence capabilities by processing vast datasets efficiently. The architecture was specifically designed to integrate well with Microsoft SQL Server, a factor that would become pivotal in the company's future.

A significant milestone in DATAllegro's history was its acquisition by Microsoft, which was announced in July 2008 and finalized in September of that year for a reported $275 million. Microsoft acquired the company to extend the capabilities of its SQL Server platform, aiming to compete more effectively with offerings from Oracle and IBM in the high-end data warehousing space. Following the acquisition, Microsoft retained most of the DATAllegro team and established its Aliso Viejo headquarters as a Center of Excellence for data warehousing, with Stuart Frost briefly leading a data warehousing group at Microsoft. The technology developed by DATAllegro became the foundation for Microsoft's subsequent SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) product.