CenturyLink Buys Cognilytics for Predictive Analytics, Big Data

CenturyLink, fresh off its purchase of disaster recovery specialist DataGardens, isn’t confining its M&A activities to cloud providers, snapping up San Jose, CA-based Cognilytics, a 200-employee, predictive analytics and Big Data specialist to mid-sized and large enterprises.

Neither company disclosed terms of the deal. Gary Gauba, Cognilytics founder, chairman and chief executive officer, will transition to CenturyLink Cognilytics president, reporting to Girish Varma, CenturyLink Global IT Services and New Market Development president.

Glen Post, CenturyLink president and chief executive, said the combined CenturyLink cloud and Cognilytics analytics portfolios will help businesses convert their data to decisions.

“CenturyLink’s network, IT services, cloud, managed and Big Data services, combined with Cognilytics’ decision sciences and advanced predictive analytics, SAP HANA expertise and Big Data solutions, will enable businesses to accelerate their Big Data adoption and monetize their data assets,” he said.

Cognilytics, which offers advanced analytics solutions in a variety of vertical markets, including financial services, retail, consumer products, healthcare, oil and gas, manufacturing, high-tech and logistics, also commands specialties in implementing Big Data technologies such as Hadoop and SAP (SAP) HANA.

“We founded Cognilytics with a mission to help customers monetize their data as a strategic asset,” Gauba said. “Our new home at CenturyLink will allow us to carry this vision forward. Together, we will focus on solving business problems and building new comprehensive solutions to provide customers with a competitive advantage,” he said.

CenturyLink’s Varma told VentureBeat that it plans to offer Cognilytics’ solutions as a cloud service.

“We’re trying to grow revenue rapidly, and given we’re already an $18 billion business, we’re trying to pick areas where you can accelerate growth pretty fast and it moves the needle,” Varma said.

In the last three years, CenturyLink has leveraged an M&A strategy to remake itself from a traditional telecom into a competitive cloud provider, buying Savvis for $3.2 billion in 2011, Tier3 and AppFog in 2013, and earlier this week nabbing DataGardens to broaden its range of cloud offerings.

The DataGardens deal fleshed out an existing strategic partnership between the two companies. The 15-person DataGardens operation–consisting of what CenturyLink called a “an impressive set of technologists and leaders”–will remain at company headquarters in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

“This is big news for our customers because it gives them a cost-effective and innovative way to mirror physical or virtual machine data to a highly available cloud environment,” the company said.