Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) today acquired Ampool and shared plans to roll the vendor's cloud-native SQL analytics platform into its Ezmeral portfolio.

The companies didn't disclose the terms of the deal, but the San Francisco-based startup raised $400,000 since Milind Bhandarkar founded the company in 2015, according to Crunchbase.

“Ampool will join the HPE Ezmeral software organization, and will play a pivotal role in accelerating HPE Ezmeral analytics runtime for interactive SQL workloads,” Anant Chintamaneni, VP and GM of HPE Ezmeral, wrote in a blog post.

Ampool’s SQL accelerator, called Ampool Engine, serves as an access layer between business intelligence tools such as Looker, QlikView, and Tableau, and large distributed data sets.

“Current on-premise SQL tools are rigid, slow, and opinionated to specific underlying storage technology like HDFS,” Chintamaneni wrote in reference to the Hadoop distributed file system.

Ampool Engine accelerates these workloads using in-memory data caching and supports a wide range of data sources including those running in the cloud, on-premises, or in third-party software-as-a-service applications such as Salesforce, according to the vendor.

HPE said it will integrate these capabilities into its Ezmeral software portfolio, the company's answer to VMware’s Tanzu and Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes platforms. Ezmeral allows customers to deploy and manage containerized applications across any infrastructure, including bare metal, virtual machines, public and private clouds, and on HPE and non-HPE hardware.

The acquisition addresses many of the challenges associated with the move to cloud-native architectures, according to HPE. This includes the need for loosely coupled query engines that can support multiple analytics and business intelligence tools, Chintamaneni explained.

“The use of multiple ephemeral container-based SQL compute engines, such as Presto and Spark, introduces the need for persistent metadata to be stored and managed externally,” he wrote. “Ampool has deep expertese in building a shared metadata catalog with role-based access control.”

Ampool Engine, now under the Ezmeral umbrella, also makes its way to HPE’s GreenLake platform, the vendor's pay-as-you-go, cloud-delivered IT portfolio.