Intel to acquire Israeli startup Granulate

Intel is planning to acquire the Israel-based developer of real-time continuous optimisation software Granulate Cloud Solution at an undisclosed price. The acquisition will help Intel’s cloud and data centre customers to maximise ‘compute workload performance’ and reduce ‘infrastructure and cloud costs’, the company said in a statement.

Workload optimisation practices, which are deployed in multi and hybrid cloud environments, have numerous advantages like faster turnaround time, real-time data capture, as well as scalable infrastructure to meet dynamic cloud demands.

Even though the deal terms are not being disclosed, Israeli newspaper Haaretz, more than a week back, had reported that Intel would be spending $650 million for buying out Granulate.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2022, subject to typical closing conditions. Once that happens, Granulate’s approximately 120 employees will be integrated into Intel’s Datacentre and Artificial Intelligence (AI) business unit.

“Today’s cloud and data centre customers demand scalable, high-performance software to make the most of their hardware deployments,” maintains Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager of the Datacentre and AI Group at Intel.

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She further said that Granulate’s cutting-edge autonomous optimisation software can be applied to production workloads without requiring the customer to make changes to its code, driving optimised hardware and software value for every cloud and data centre customer.

While making the announcement, Intel claimed that Granulate’s autonomous optimisation service enables cloud and data centre customers to significantly improve the performance of their deployments, reduce operational overhead and lower application costs. Furthermore, Granulate’s service does not require developer intervention nor does it require the customer to make changes to its own code, as per Intel’s claims.

“Together with Intel, we believe we can help customers achieve meaningful cost reductions and five times the throughput across workloads,” said Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate. “As a part of Intel, Granulate will be able to deliver autonomous optimisation capabilities to even more customers globally and rapidly expand its offering with the help of Intel’s 19,000 software engineers.”

Intel and Granulate’s relationship began in late 2019 when Granulate was part of the first graduating class of Intel Ignite, the startup accelerator program that taps into Intel’s resources to help early-stage companies succeed. Over the past year, both the companies have worked together under a commercial agreement to collaborate on workload optimisation on Xeon (a kind of processor) deployments, as revealed by the US chipmaker.