EMC to acquire data warehouse vendor Greenplum

Computerworld - EMC Corp. has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Greenplum Inc., a provider of data warehousing software that is used to build large cloud computing infrastructures.

A privately held company, San Mateo, Calif.-based Greenplum sells a data warehouse platform based on a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that can scale out to petabytes of storage capacity. The software also comes with self-service analytics.

EMC said that once the acquisition is completed, Greenplum will form the foundation of a new data computing product division within EMC's information infrastructure business.

EMC would not disclose the amount of the all-cash transaction but said it expects to close the deal in the third quarter of this year. EMC said it will continue to offer Greenplum's full product portfolio to customers and plans to deliver new EMC integrated hardware and software offerings.

Greenplum software is used by data-driven businesses around the world, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media for sophisticated, high-performance data analytics.

Greenplum CEO Bill Cook will lead the new product division and report to Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer of EMC's information infrastructure products group.

"The data warehousing world is about to change," Gelsinger said in a statement. "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," Gelsinger said.

An EMC spokesman told Computerworld that Greenplum is capable of delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional database software at a dramatically lower cost. "Data-driven businesses around the world, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Skype, Equifax, T-Mobile and Fox Interactive Media have adopted Greenplum for sophisticated, high-performance data analytics," he said via e-mail.

Jeff Wiggin, vice president of enterprise systems at T-Mobile USA, said, "Greenplum and EMC have the potential to be a powerful and transformational combination. It could present many opportunities for T-Mobile USA to deliver new, innovative technology solutions that have an impact on our ability to be more efficient, effective and provide better service to our customers."

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at  @lucasmearian or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed . His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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