Today EMC surprised the industry with its announcement that it is acquiring the privately held California based Greenplum Inc., a leading player in data warehousing space with a successful big data platform with superior business analytics. EMC is planning to use this acquisition to form a new data computing product division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC), the world’s leading provider of information infrastructure solutions, today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire California-based Greenplum, Inc. Greenplum is a privately-held, fast-growing provider of disruptive data warehousing technology, a key enabler of “big data” clouds and self-service analytics. Upon completion of the acquisition, Greenplum will form the foundation of a new data computing product division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
EMC, which recently shut down its Atmos Online service, has taken a bold step to enter the big data segment by acquiring a company that was ranked a leader in Gartner’s Data Warehouse DBMS magic quadrant recently. It clearly shows that EMC is understanding where the enterprise game is moving, a big data future. Greenplum has raised 61M in funding with more than 100 employees at the time of acquisition. At a time when enterprises are aggregating and managing data from terrabytes to petabytes, a company like Greenplum, with their expertise in Enterprise Data Clouds, is a hot candidate for acquisition for bigger companies wanting to capture the market. With Oracle having Exadata in its lineup, this is a logical move for EMC if they have to target the enterprise big data market.
Briefly, Greenplum Database utilizes a shared-nothing MPP (massively parallel processing) architecture that has been designed from the ground up for BI and analytical processing using commodity hardware. In this architecture, data is automatically partitioned across multiple ‘segment’ servers, and each ‘segment’ owns and manages a distinct portion of the overall data. All communication is via a network interconnect with no disk-level sharing. In this era of increased use of business analytics in the enterprises, the self service analytics component of the platform will provide enterprises with the real time analytics they want. This is a great move from EMC to combine their infrastructure with Greenplum’s platform and analytics to offer highly optimized, high performance tool to the enterprises.
This fact was highlighted by Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, when he said,
The data warehousing world is about to change. Greenplum’s massively-parallel, scale-out architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has enabled it to separate itself from the incumbent players and emerge as the leader in this industry shift toward ‘big data’ analytics. Greenplum’s market-leading technology combined with EMC’s virtualized Private Cloud infrastructure provides customers, today, with a best-of-breed solution for tomorrow’s ‘big-data’ challenges.
Interesting days are ahead in the enterprise big data markets and EMC has positioned itself as a strong contender in this future.
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