Calligo acquires Decisive Data to advance data science as a service

Calligo, a provider of managed data services, announced it has acquired Decisive Data to expand the scope of the data analytics capabilities it can provide. Terms of the acquisition, the tenth made by the company since 2012, were not disclosed.

The goal is to eliminate the need for organizations to build and deploy their own data analytics platforms that they then need to hire full-time employees to manage, said Calligo CEO Julian Box. In fact, many organizations are increasingly focused more on the outcome analytics that applications enable rather than the applications and platforms they run on, he added.

“The infrastructure is a utility,” he said. “Customers are not going to care about the technology behind it.”

While many organizations have come to appreciate the business value of data science, it often turns out that the data needed to drive those applications has been poorly maintained for years. Not only is data both incomplete and often conflicting, many organizations are unsure what data they possess, Box noted. More troubling still, much of the data that organizations do retain isn’t especially useful when it comes to applying analytics. IT services providers such as Calligo enable organizations to accelerate data science initiatives by, among other things, helping them better understand what data they do have that is most relevant, Box said.

Despite all the hype surrounding digital business transformation, IT managers know that unless they can ensure data quality, most data science initiatives will not ultimately live up to expectations. In fact, the biggest issue many organizations face isn’t understanding the digital business possibilities. Rather, it’s simply the ability to execute. Data is strewn all across enterprise IT environments.

Organizations, of course, are investing in data warehouses and data lakes to bring some order to the data management chaos. However, the cost of building and maintaining these platforms, along with the applications required to make sense of that data, is not inconsequential. In a lot of cases, rather than requiring IT personnel to become data science experts, it may be simpler to ask an external service provider to provide an answer to a question that may not be all that dissimilar from a query that executives at another company made the day before.

The analytics services Calligo provides have now moved beyond the company’s initial focus on enabling organizations to comply with data privacy regulations, Box said. Decisive Data extends that mission by adding a set of visualization tools and associated best practices for data analytics the company has defined, he added.

While some larger enterprises may be inclined to invest in building their own applications, Box said analytics services provided by firms such as Calligo will soon democratize data science. Over time, smaller to midsize organizations will prefer to rely on external data science services to level the analytics playing field as they compete with those larger enterprises, he added.

That approach also reduces investment risks in data science initiatives, because each project becomes an operational expense that can be terminated at any time. In contrast, larger organizations that build their own full-time data science teams and associated applications will incur higher costs, said Box.

Previous acquisitions Calligo has made included IT services firms such as Network Integrity Services, Cinnte Technologies, DC Networks, and Itomic Voice & Data. Initially, many of the acquisitions made by Calligo were focused on traditional IT services. However, Box said that all recent and future acquisitions will focus on data management and science. Calligo is owned by Investcorp Technology Partners.

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