On Apr 29, 2019, it is reported that ByteDance, the parental company of Toutiao and Tik Tok, acquired Terark, which is a big data analysis company.
On Apr 29, 2019, it is reported that ByteDance, the parental company of Toutiao and Tik Tok, acquired Terark, which is a big data analysis company. ZHANG Yiming (张一鸣), the founder and CEO of ByteDance, occupies 98.81% of the Terark’s share. According to the data from Tiancha, on Apr 22, 2019, Qijian Software (奇简软件), which is the parental company of Terark, has changed its shareholder structure. Xingyun Chuangji technology company (星云创迹), which is a wholly owned subsidiary company of ByteDance, became the big shareholder of Qijian. Meanwhile, ZHANG Lidong (张利东), the senior vice president of Toutiao, became the legal representative of Qijian and worked as the executive manager of the company.
Qijian is founded in Nov 2015 and based in Beijing, focuses on data storage and searching. Terark Database is the core product of Qijian. In 2018, Terark announced that the performance of TerarkDB has exceeded the similar products of Facebook, Google, and Berkely. The Terark DB has a smaller size and a faster search speed, which could improve the performance of big data applications to 10 times. Meanwhile, Terark could lower more than 50% of the cost. For example, the 800G TPC-H data could be compressed into 47.9G with Terark’s technology. It is obvious that Terark has a significant meaning to the big data field.
According to IDC’s statistics, by 2020, the total market capacity of China’s big data industry would be more than USD 800 billion, and China would be the largest data center at that time. The compressing of data could not only cut down the cost but also provide high-quality services to customers. GUO Kuan (郭宽), the co-founder of Terark said that the world’s markets have a strong requirement of data compress technology, which makes Terark valuable. With the increase of the database, the users’ requirements of the experiences of Internet services increases as well. In this way, the enterprises must increase its efficiency of the data storage and offers a faster service reaction speed.
The Terark’s team is made up of engineers from famous enterprises including Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Baidu, while the R&D employee ratio was 85%. With the strong R&D technology, Terark has owned 6 patents including researching technology, storage engine, and database. ByteDance, as the leading Internet company in China, owns Toutiao and Tik Tok, which offers news and short-video resources to users with AI technology. The deep learning mode could intelligently analyze the users’ habits and smartly recommend the resources that users may be interested in. Currently, ByteDance ranks 2nd in terms of monthly active users, only behind Tencent. The huge user base generates a lot of data which requires to be compressed and managed. With the acquisition of Terark, ByteDance may have a stronger ability to manage its huge data and offers a higher quality to users both from China and overseas.