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CSC enslaves Infochimps to create army of big data monkeymen

Integrator announces acquisition alongside income boost from cost-cutting

In an announcement so garbled that our Big Data Translator had to be coated in Hadoop-based lubricant to spew out some sense, analytics company Infochimps has been acquired by outsourcer-extraordinaire CSC.

The data-analytics company announced it had been acquired on Tuesday alongside CSC's earnings, during which CSC reported a net income of $159m from revenues of $3.26bn.

That income was substantially up on the $42m in the same quarter a year ago, and was probably helped along by the company's recent decision to first scrap its M&S vouchers for UK staff in March, and then by announcing plans to fire hundreds of Brits in August, but keep some on to train their off-shored replacements.

With income buoyed by a round of what – no doubt – internal executives term "rationalisation", CSC has flashed an undisclosed amount of cash to grab Infochimps and plug the company's employees and tech into itself.

Infochimps sells three big data services, all of which are available either on-premise, in a multi-tenant public cloud, or in a single-tenant virtual private cloud.

These services include data processing via Cloud::Streams, which is an in-memory, real-time analytics, distributed ETL, and complex event processing platform wrapped into one, analytics via Cloud::Queries which is a data store and query engine, and hosted Hadoop via, you guessed it, Cloud::Hadoop.

A CSC spokesman told The Register that no redundancies are planned and Infochimps will retain its current offices in Austin and Redwood City. The company will report into the general manager of CSC's Big Data and Analytics unit, Sashi Reddi.

Infochimps CEO Jim Kaskade wrote in a lingo-laden blog post that CSC will "leverage" InfoChimps "as a force multiplier in driving new client experiences and thought leadership".

If that isn't clear enough for you, Kaskade explains: "We now have the opportunity to practice what we've been preaching, by splicing the Infochimps DNA into the CSC organization, acting as a change agent, and ultimately accelerating CSC's development of its data services platform."

He assures us that "when CSC begins to insert the Infochimps DNA into its global staff of 90,000 employees ... powerful things are bound to happen".

These "powerful things" are not the transfiguration of 90,000 employees into chimp-men, but instead the borging of a reasonably well-respected data services company into a global IT giant. ®

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