A good few years into the Big Data revolution, the market is finally seeing some much-needed consolidation as the competitive swimming lanes begin to crystallize and those that are unable to keep up in the race either go out of business or end up getting acquired. The latter has turned out to be the case with Karmasphere, which was recently picked up by credit scoring software giant FICO, also known as the Fair Isaac Corporation.

The Cupertino, California-based Karmasphere hit the scene four years ago with a then-pioneering native business intelligence solution for Hadoop designed to simplify batch analytics to the point of making the technology easily accessible to everyday enterprise. The company garnered a lot of buzz in the subsequent two years, raising more than $14 million in funding along the way and helping to bring ease of use into the centre of the Big Data discussion, but the initial momentum proved short lived as early adoption trailed behind the hype.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but considering how much capital the company has raised, it’s likely valued in the millions or tens of millions – even if it was a somewhat desperate sale.  The acquisition provides a dignified exit for the startup and its investors and a valuable addition to FICO’s portfolio. The purchase buys the company both technology and perhaps most importantly, the knowhow of the Karmasphere team, including founder Martin Hall, who has more than 25 years of management experience in the IT industry under his belt.

Karmasphere’s software will be baked into the FICO Analytic Cloud, a hosted service pegged a “one-stop-shop for all things analytics.’ Unveiled last fall, the solution combines the company’s Decision Management Platform with a set of complementary applications that aim to take some of the hassle out of steering a large company and everything that entails, from keeping spending in check to identifying new growth opportunities.

“Our goal is to simplify the complexity of Hadoop and put the power of Big Data analytics into the hands of all of the people who can really use it,” said Doug Clare, the vice president of product management at FICO. “By embedding a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use interface for Hadoop data access into the FICO Analytic Cloud, we’re accelerating the democratization and wide-scale adoption of Big Data analytics by organizations of all sizes and across all industries.”

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