Astronomer Spins Out MetaRouter, a Company Focused on Secure Clickstream Data Routing

CINCINNATI--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Astronomer, creator of the leading managed Apache Airflow platform, announced today that it has successfully completed the spin-off of its streaming data routing (“Clickstream”) division into the newly created MetaRouter, which will provide SaaS, private cloud and on-premise data routing solutions for organizations requiring enhanced security and flexibility. The new company has received funding from existing Astronomer investors, and Astronomer co-founder, Tim Brunk, will be taking the role of CEO. He is joined by Astronomer’s dedicated Clickstream engineering team, including Lead Product Engineer, Andrew Murray. MetaRouter will use its new capital to build out its engineering and product teams to accelerate the commercialization of its new enterprise products.

“While our SaaS Clickstream business has continued to grow, we have received a considerable number of prospects looking for a more secure solution that gives them control over the system’s components and the underlying raw data,” said Ry Walker, CEO of Astronomer. “In the wake of new compliance requirements like GDPR and continued high-profile data breaches, companies are looking for data routing solutions they can manage directly. The opportunity to build a VPC or on-prem deployed platform for ingesting and routing clickstream data is too good to ignore.”

MetaRouter’s new Enterprise platform is built in a modular fashion allowing companies to own the whole data routing system (“end-to-end”), or just the components they need to fit into their existing data infrastructure. Leveraging open-source systems like Kubernetes, the entire system can be deployed into any private cloud environment including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure Cloud Service or on-premise, and can be up and running in hours. For example, if a customer already has an internal data collection technology, they can purchase MetaRouter’s Data Conditioner and Data Router modules to clean, filter, and direct the flow of collected data.

The Enterprise Platform also gives customers an unprecedented level of control over their customer data, allowing them to own the raw data and control what is sent out to third parties. No data leaves the customer’s secure environment until it is sent directly to its desired end point over secure server-side connections. This server-side connectivity also has the benefit of being faster and more secure. Companies moving their marketing and analytics integrations from the client or browser to the server see materials reductions in site latency and bounce rate.

“For several months, we have been pioneering our Enterprise Platform with a Fortune 500 retailer and are now beginning to open access up to new customers. The value to large or fast growing businesses of having transparency and control over the system and its components is impossible to overstate,” says Tim Brunk, MetaRouter CEO. “It’s all the perks of a home-grown system minus the years and massive investment required to build and maintain it.”

The MetaRouter Enterprise Platform is built using the leading tools for Big Data transportation, including Apache Kafka and Kubernetes. The modular design allows for easy updates or substitutions of the core internal technologies to keep the platform updated with the latest “best-in-class” offerings.

The MetaRouter team has significant experience working with streaming customer data—as well as the third party analytics and marketing vendor integrations commonly used with that data—through their involvement in building and supporting Astronomer’s global Clickstream business. MetaRouter will begin hiring immediately to expand its product and engineering teams.

“Our Product Roadmap is aggressive but designed around years of customer feedback and inbound requests,” says Andrew Murray, MetaRouter CTO. “We’re excited to add new engineers and product leaders to the team as the technical challenges before us are significant. There’s a reason no-one else is offering a solution like this. But those same challenges are what excite and motivate us.”

MetaRouter will also continue to support and develop its SaaS product offering. “Our SaaS product is actually just a large deployment of our Enterprise Platform, managed by MetaRouter with partitioned access for each customer,” says Brunk. “It will directly benefit from each upgrade and release we make to the Enterprise Platform.” More information on the SaaS product can be found here: www.metarouter.io/#cloud.

Astronomer and MetaRouter will continue to have a close partnership and have a license agreement in place for Astronomer’s Apache Airflow platform to support data warehouse loading for MetaRouter customers desiring to store clickstream data in Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure and other data warehouses.

For more information or to join the MetaRouter team, visit: www.metarouter.io or follow us on Twitter: @metarouter.

About MetaRouter:

Based in Cincinnati, OH with a globally distributed engineering team, MetaRouter builds streaming data routing solutions for security sensitive companies. MetaRouter is a spin-out company from Astronomer, Inc., creators of the leading Apache Airflow platform. MetaRouter also provides server-side, third party integration development and streaming data infrastructure consulting services.

About Astronomer, Inc.:

Based in Cincinnati, OH, Astronomer is dedicated to helping Apache Airflow win in the marketplace, and is the first company to offer a commercial platform and support for Apache Airflow. Astronomer Enterprise can be deployed in minutes to your Kubernetes for maximum security and control. Astronomer also provides support, services and training to help your organization adopt an agile data engineering culture. Astronomer is trusted by Fortune 100 companies and startups, around the world. For more information, visit www.astronomer.io.

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