Greenplum's technology is based on an open-source database and massively parallel processing that can be deployed as software or as a standalone "appliance," a marketplace that has grown steadily over the last five years and includes competitors such as Dataupia, Kickfire and Neteeza. Greenplum's customers include NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media.
Beyond tapping into a tech hotspot EMC can resell to its customer base, the acquisition gives EMC a full data warehousing stack of technology. Greenplum will form the foundation of a new data computing product division within EMC's Information Infrastructure business. Greenplum also complements EMC strategy for deploying cloud computing, according to the companies.
Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus says the deal should kick off a new wave of consolidation in which large hardware vendors are likely to snap up established and upcoming pure play vendors, and that Greenplum was a "plum" among those.
"They had come very far very fast, they were five or six years old at the most and have more than 100 customers," Kobielus says. "That's a lot farther than HP has come over the same amount of time with [HP product] NeoView."
That's not so much a slap at HP as indication that more acquisitions are likely to follow. The analyst says HP could well enter the game with an acquisition such as Vertica or even integration specialist Informatica. "It was just a matter of who'd make an offer and when," Kobielus says. "From what I understand, this was EMC's idea and led to an offer Grenplum didn't expect and it was a good one."
Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, said in a statement that "the data warehousing world is about to change" to what he called big-data analytics.
Greenplum CEO Bill Cook will move over to EMC and lead the new product
division and report to Gelsinger. The value of the all-cash deal was not disclosed.
Jim Ericson is editorial director of Information Management, a SourceMedia publication. You can reach him at Jim.Ericson@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @jimericson.
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