CRN Exclusive: Top AWS Partner Day1 Acquires Data Analytics Shop

Elite Amazon Web Services channel partner Day1 Solutions has acquired a big-data consulting firm to strengthen its higher-education, health-care, and oil and gas practices.

The deal -- with 11-person firm OpenOsmium of Herndon, Va. -- will strengthen Day1's abilities around pattern matching for large data sets, cataloging and managing data from the Internet of Things (IoT) and helping customers figure out how to use new specialty technology, according to Matt Collins, Day1's vice president of engineering and services.

"We saw an opportunity to pull in a different firm and have that in one house," Luis Benavides, founder and CEO of Day1, told CRN exclusively. Most of OpenOsmium's employees came over to Day1, with CEO Sadayappan "Chida" Chidambaram taking over as Day1's chief technology officer for Big Data and Analytics.

[Related: Coming Together In The Cloud: Day1 Acquires Logic Method IT]

The deal with OpenOsmium, which closed April 1, follows Day1's acquisition of cloud managed services provider Logic Method IT in November as well as the cloud services group of a nationally recognized engineering firm. McLean, Va.-based Day1 was one of just six managed service providers nationwide named to the new AWS cloud partner program in March.

The OpenOsmium deal brings Day1's head count close to 60, and the MSP plans to add at least 30 employees through additional mergers and acquisitions, Benavides said. The initial focus of the deal will be around extending Day1's Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities to incorporate data center optimization of workloads, Collins said, with plans to eventually enter into application scenarios.

"Big data is part of the business solution," he said. OpenOsmium specializes in applying predictive analytics technologies to get more insights out of end-user data.

As new forms of consumer-oriented data become available for the first time, Collins said, businesses are looking toward technology for ways to improve their time to market or optimize their supply chain.

Bringing OpenOsmium on board adds additional strength to Day1's AWS offering, especially as more customers look to take advantage of the public cloud for big-data scenarios, Collins said. There's also increased demand for data crunching in hybrid cloud scenarios, Collins said, particularly in the NetApp and Cisco ecosystems.

Although Day1 and OpenOsmium have customers around the country, both companies have the majority of their sales and delivery teams in the mid-Atlantic, Collins said. The MSP wants to expand into an additional nine states within the next year to 18 months, Benavides said, including Florida, Georgia, Texas and other locations where Amazon has a strong presence.

Day1 already has a presence in the higher-education and health-care verticals, Benavides said, and would be looking to team up with OpenOsmium to create a Texas-focused oil and gas practice.

What all three sectors have in common is reams of data, with universities sitting on top of genome data sets, and oil and gas firms still carrying piles of papers created before computers existed with lots of unstructured data, Chidambaram said. And marrying OpenOsmium's big-data expertise to Day1's cloud capabilities will make it easier for the combined company to land big health-care providers, he said.

OpenOsmium saw that most of its existing customers were adopting big-data strategies in the cloud space, meaning the company needed better infrastructure and framework to scale itself up, Chidambaram said. Becoming part of Day1 give OpenOsmium a bigger platform with a leading cloud provider like Amazon, he said, and will allow the company to reach more clients.

The combined company has adopted vendor-neutral, open-source solutions so that end users can obtain data analytics capabilities without having to pony up for a large, expensive system, Chidambaram said. Day1 hopes to leverage its expertise to extend the big data capabilities that exist today around Hadoop to SQL, he said.

And as for the Internet of Things, Collins said, Day1 now has the ability to address everything from acquiring and security data to ingesting and managing it across multiple communication vehicles.

PUBLISHED MAY 8, 2015