Fluree, the Winston-Salem blockchain database company, has completed its first merger since the company’s founding in 2016.
Fluree acquired ZettaLabs, a New Jersey company that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to prepare raw data for analytics.
The acquisition will result in a new product that will allow Fluree to expand its offerings to serve enterprises that need data-centric architecture and legacy data infrastructure modernization
As part of the merger, ZettaLabs and its employees will become part of Fluree, bringing the Winston-Salem company’s headcount to 50. ZettaLabs’ co-founder and CEO Eliud Polanco will become president of Fluree.
“At Fluree, we are building the data infrastructure for the future,” co-founder and CEO Brian Platz said. “While many of our customers enjoy the unique benefits of our semantic graph distributed ledger database technology, we recognize that organizations first need a way out of their entrenched silos in order to build their end-goal infrastructures.
“Dealing with legacy infrastructure is one of the biggest challenges for modern businesses, but nearly 74% of organizations are failing to complete legacy data migration products today due to inefficient tooling and a lack of interoperability. By adding the ZettaLabs team and product suite to our own, Fluree is poised to help organizations on their data infrastructure transformation journeys by uniquely addressing all major aspects of migration and integration – security, governance and semantic interoperability."
Merger creates new product called Fluree Sense
ZettaSense, the flagship product of ZettaLabs, has been rebranded as Fluree Sense. A data pipeline, the product uses AI and machine learning to normalize, cleanse and harmonize data from different sources in a way that does not require additional governance, master data management or data quality software.
Fluree Sense makes data in existing legacy databases, data warehouses and data lakes ready for downstream enterprise consumption and sharing.
“We developed our flagship product, ZettaSense, to ingest, classify, resolve and cleanse big data coming from a variety of sources. The problem is that the underlying data technical architecture – with multiple operational data stores, warehouses and lakes, now spreading out across multiple clouds – is continuing to grow in complexity,” Polanco said. “Now with Fluree, our shared customer base and any new customers can evolve to a modern and elegant data-centric infrastructure that will allow them to more efficiently and effectively share cleansed data both inside and outside its organizational borders.”
Existing Fluree customers will be able to automate migration into their Fluree database infrastructure using the new product, while existing ZettaLab customers will be able to onboard their data into Fluree’s platform.
Fluree Sense expands into new market with merger
Currently, Fluree mainly serves the enterprise data management market with new data projects that have specific requirements for data trust, integrity, sharing and/or security.
Approximately 90% of businesses are hindered by legacy data infrastructures and do not have the ability to transform effectively, according to a report by the International Data Corporation.
Fluree will now be able to serve those businesses and grow their customer base, including large, enterprise financial service companies.
Potential case uses for Fluree Sense include:
- Legacy data migrations that cleanse and integrate data from multiple sources to enable migration from a legacy enterprise business platform to a target digital platform;
- Customer data integrations that integrate customer, account, product and transaction data from multiple sources into a single record;
- Consent management that enables active customer consent and control of how data is shared;
- And cross-border data residency allowing secure sharing of information across borders that adheres to the various national data-privacy regulations using multi-party computation.
“We don’t have a lack of data today; we have a lack of high-quality data,” said Peter Serenita, chairman of the Enterprise Data Management Council. “This is why it is essential for enterprises to take a data-centric approach to their modernization initiatives in order to truly transform their legacy infrastructure and eliminate their data silos for good.
"Joining forces with the ZettaLabs team and product will allow Fluree to continue its mission of turning big data into better data for sustainable business outcomes.”
