> Is Riak so critical to Bet365 that the right move was to _buy the company_ versus switching to a different storage system?
Quite possibly, yes. Data has incredible inertia. Not only because of the storage system used, but also all of the years of ops tooling, application integration, etc. that surrounds it. I don't know anything about Bet 365, but if they had any non-trivial amount of their business data locked up in Riak then from a cost/risk analysis they may have decided that purchasing the company was the safest and cheapest option to protect their own company.
Quite possibly, yes. Data has incredible inertia. Not only because of the storage system used, but also all of the years of ops tooling, application integration, etc. that surrounds it. I don't know anything about Bet 365, but if they had any non-trivial amount of their business data locked up in Riak then from a cost/risk analysis they may have decided that purchasing the company was the safest and cheapest option to protect their own company.