Microsoft has bought Osmos, an AI-assisted data engineering platform, in a bid to enrich its Fabric data platform, encroaching on so-called partners' markets.

Founded in 2019, Osmos was already making its pipeline and upload products available on Fabric, based around open source Apache Spark.

In a blog post, Bogdan Crivat, Microsoft corporate veep for Azure Data Analytics, said the purchase will support Fabric's mission to give customers an approach to "unify all data and analytics into a single, secure platform."

"With the acquisition of Osmos, we are taking the next step toward a future where autonomous AI agents work alongside people – helping reduce operational overhead and making it easier for customers to connect, prepare, analyze and share data across the organization," he said.

In a separate statement, Roy Hasson, Microsoft senior director of product, said the buy will simplify extract-transform-load data engineering tasks (ETL) with Apache Spark using AI.

"Osmos launched their AI data wrangler and AI data engineering agents on Microsoft Fabric as a native app almost two years ago, allowing customers to quickly unpack, convert and transform complex, un/semi-structured data into ready-to-use Iceberg tables stored in [Microsoft lakehouse] OneLake," he said in a social media post.

"We quickly realized that customers loved using Osmos on top of Fabric Spark and it reduced their dev and maintenance efforts by 50 percent."

• SAP users in the dark about vendor's plan for data analytics
• Snowflake goes all out to woo PostgreSQL developers with lakehouse extensions
• Lance takes aim at Parquet in file format joust
• Microsoft weaves Oracle and BigQuery data mirroring into Fabric platform

The statement hints at a shift in emphasis in Microsoft's data platform strategy. The Fabric data platform launched in late 2023 by leaning heavily on open source technology from Databricks, which extensively works with Microsoft and integrates its products tightly into the Azure cloud.

Databricks was initially built around open source Spark, though it has since branched out. An example of the tight integration between the two firms comes from Microsoft's Mirroring data replication, which takes a snapshot of the external database to OneLake in Delta Parquet, an open source table format, originally developed by Databricks and a rival to Iceberg. Microsoft had initially put forward Delta as the table format of choice on Fabric, although it also supports Iceberg, which Databricks wants to integrate with Delta in the long term.

With the Osmos purchase, there is a shift in emphasis away from Delta and Databricks, which also provides automated ETL tools on Azure. Databricks must now compete with another Microsoft-owned product.

Osmos co-founder and CEO Kirat Pandya is a veteran of both Microsoft and Google. In 2021, Osmos raised $13 million in funding, led by Raviraj Jain from Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from CRV, Pear, and SV Angel. The value of the Microsoft buyout was not disclosed. ®