Greenplum buy puts EMC further into cloud, BI, businesses

Computerworld - EMC's agreement to buy Greenplum Inc. adds a key component to the storage vendor's strategy to boost its business intelligence and data analytics business.

EMC has long been trying to shed its image as a data storage vendor in order to become recognized as a player in the larger information infrastructure business. Tuesday's move is the latest aimed at fulfilling EMC's goal of providing the hardware and software users need to build large cloud infrastructures, and the analytical tools that can be used to mine data stored within those clouds.

In a written analysis, IT Market Strategy analyst Merv Adrian said Greenplum gives EMC a structured data management tool for databases.

Citing dozens of other EMC acquisitions in recent years, Adrian wrote "Disruptive? You bet. Is EMC finished with acquisitions? I doubt it." The acquisitions have ranged from very small vendors to large companies like unstructured data archive vender Documentum and virualization vendor VMware.

Adrian said EMC is likely to continue looking to buy business intelligence tool providers, master data management firms, as well as a companies that sells ETL (extract, transform, and load) software, which allow businesses to consolidate data from disparate systems.

"Finally, and not least, it's about performance. Technical improvements become more possible when a vendor owns the whole stack. Balancing IO, processor speed, memory, multiple tiers of storage, virtualization, security, calls to external analytics, ingesting data, exporting data - all become more tunable, more optimizable, if you own all the pieces," Adrian added.

Charles King, principal analyst at market research firm Pund-IT Inc., said the Greenplum acquisition is also about EMC getting its foot in the door with cloud service providers, enabling the data storage vendor to compete against other cloud storage providers, such as Amazon.com and its S3 hosted storage service.

"It's really about understanding that storing data is the foundation for information intelligence, but you need a lot of tools to really allow the users to enjoy the greatest benefits from it," King said. "I think Greenplum is just another step forward in this broad but powerful strategy."

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

San Mateo, Calif.-based Greenplum sells a data warehouse platform based on a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that can scale out to hundreds of servers running a single database instance. Greenplum's software is used in business analytics and is flexible in the different business applications for which it can be used, King said.

For example, privately-held Greenplum has a customer list of more than 100 companies that include large retailers such as Sears and Sony as well as financial services entities such as Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange or telecommunications providers such as Vodafone and Skype.

"They're using Greenplum's technology to mine their data warehouse to garner insight on data they've collected," King said.

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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