"Arm, major British semiconductor design company, acquires software startup for 600 million USD." The media featured this story in their headlines in March 2018. The company that was acquired is called Treasure Data and was established in the US by 3 Japanese people (the company is currently a subsidiary of SoftBank Vision Fund).
Treasure Data provides a service called the customer data platform. The customer data platform is a tool that serves as a foundation to collect and analyze big data about customers in a variety of forms, such as purchase history, ad view history, and social media posts. They are used to drive the marketing activity of famous companies in Japan and overseas. Co-founder Sadayuki Furuhashi almost single-handedly developed the software that serves as the core of this service.
An example of something that Furuhashi has developed is Fluentd, which is open-source software. It collects and stores massive amounts of log files from various data sources. The tool then converts the files into a unified format and produces an output. Usually, processes to collect data and produce an output have to be created for each separate data source, but Fluentd is able to handle data sources more flexibly using plug-ins. Having been received positively for its ease of use, it has been adopted by tech giants like Uber and Apple, as well as cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
Furuhashi also developed the compressed data format called MessagePack. Since it allows for massive amounts of data to be used efficiently and rapidly, it has spread widely across businesses with large systems that would like to reduce their energy consumption.
Furuhashi is commended not just for developing these types of software, but also for releasing them as open-source software so that they can be used widely. The software that Furuhashi has worked on has been downloaded hundreds of millions of times around the world and has become popular as a foundation for handling large-scale data. Furuhashi states, "Large-scale distributed computing will likely become technology that humankind can access universally and fairly, rather than technology that only a subgroup of major companies can access exclusively."
