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 announced today that they are acquiring Greenplum a company that makes disruptive data warehousing technology that enables "big data" clouds with self service analytics.   I was sensing something was brewing from EMC but didn’t expect this to happen this fast.

Competitive Moves – Smart EMC

We all remember Data Domain and the bidding war after Net App wanted to fill that hole in their product line.  For those who don’t remember EMC won the day with money to prevent NetApp from that product advantage.  To this day EMC has a product advantage over NetApp because of the Data Domain acquisition.

Just last week I wrote a post talking about the role of big data in the enterprise when Cloudera announced that they were releasing the new enterprise "big data" platform and business model.

With Greenplum we see some similary good moves by EMC.  Instead it’s not a takeaway from the competition (NetApp), but a counter  against the big bad Oracle who has Exadata. Exadata has been getting good reviews of late and so has Greenplum.  Greenplum has success all around the ecosystem from open source to the big commercial vendors.

This is the EMC statement loaded with quotes (usually a PR gesture that means that it’s a big deal) — enjoy

Today, new forms of data — massive amounts of it — are emerging more quickly than ever before thanks to always-on networks, the Web, a flood of consumer content, surveillance systems, sensors and the like.  In a recent report, IDC predicted that over the next 10 years the amount of digital data created annually will grow 44 fold.  Companies are increasingly turning to new architectures and new tools to help make sense of this "big data" phenomenon.

Regarded by industry experts as a visionary leader, Greenplum utilizes a "shared-nothing" massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that has been designed from the ground up for analytical processing using virtualized x86 infrastructure. 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.

Pat Gelsinger, President and Chief Operating Officer, EMC Information Infrastructure Products, 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."

Bill Cook, Greenplum CEO, said, "EMC and Greenplum bring extraordinary potential to customers at the intersection of ‘big data’ and sophisticated analytics. As technology and business partners, EMC and Greenplum witness daily the enthusiasm with which customers embrace how together we impact their businesses in very tangible, positive and meaningful ways. The technology speaks for itself. What energizes us most now is EMC’s ability to open new doors of opportunity and accelerate delivery of our joint vision for the future."

Scott McNealy, executive advisor to Greenplum, said, "EMC’s strength in the enterprise, and Greenplum’s push to fully transform data warehousing and business analytics, makes for a perfect fit. Together they are brilliantly bringing together the power of cloud computing, virtualization, and social collaboration to help customers as they venture into the next phase of computing and business analytics."

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."

The acquisition of Greenplum will be an all-cash transaction and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.  The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the full 2010 fiscal year.  Upon close, Bill Cook will lead the new data computing product division and report to Pat Gelsinger.  EMC will continue to offer Greenplum’s full product portfolio to customers and plans to deliver new EMC Proven reference architectures as well as an integrated hardware and software offering designed to improve performance and drive down implementation costs.

Here is Pat Gelsinger at SAP Sapphire talking about competition landscape and more

Enterprise 2.0 – Done Deal – It’s Happening Folks – It’s not Social Media – It’s Data

The biggest and fastest growing trend we are monitoring here on SiliconANGLE is the new Enterprise 2.0 around "converged infrastructure" meets "virtualization and cloud computing" – driving all that is users, applications, and data (both big data and little data).

It’s not about SaaS any more.  In fact, Marc Benioff said publicly that he is completely re-engineering this entire product to meet the new forces in the market.  Salesforce is basically throwing away a decade of development because it’s outdated.  That speaks volumes because Salesforce is a leading cloud vendor, can you imagine how out of touch most corporate enterprises are?

How CIOs Think – Levis Strauss CIO Talks About Competition With Big Vendors

Tom Peck talked with me about his view as CIO and how acquisitions changes how he evaluates vendors.  He talks about support SLA etc but clearly the stack wars are affecting them to build large enterprise so that they could grow and drive value for their company.

CIO Video – Tom Peck CIO of Levis Strauss

Big Problem – Too Much New Data Too Fast

The big problem facing growing enterprises is that they are flooded with more new types of data.  Application and new user data from mobile devices and applications, are changing the mandates from CEOs and CIO of medium and large enterprises.  This new world of "big data" is putting pressure on the enterprise to develop both business and technical model innovation strategies like nothing seen before.  Hence the traction of the public and private cloud debate.

Data = Better User Experience; Better User Experience = Monetization

As we’ve been saying at SiliconAngle for over a year now, data is becoming the most important thing for developers and now for advertisers especially in mobile. Data drives a better user experience and a better user experience drive monetization. Data and data analysis is at the heart of this value proposition.

Look at the search industry in say Google. Having access to data enabled Google to build a quality search product and ad network.  With Google constantly iterating their data quality they were able to consistently build better algorithms to present users with a compelling search product.

In mobile and smartphones search doesn’t really work like on the wbe due to the screen size and real time nature of mobility. So display advertising hold the best seat at the table with respect to the search opportunity on mobile.  The display ad and applications will be the vehicle where innovation (e.g. like search in late 90s) around consumer experience will occur.

The result for consumers will look like some automated cloud service that will do most of the work and then just show up in the display of the smartphone.

My Angle:  It’s All About Data – Data Innovation Cycle – Example:  SmartPhones Enabled This Phenomenon

With the creation of the iPhone and the iPad the industry is seeing massive change.  A paradigm that I haven’t seen since the disruption of the browser.  I expect to see some major game changing user experiences over the next 10 years.  I call it the mobile innovation cycle – enabled by Apple’s iPhone a few years ago.

My analogy:  What the iPhone will do for mobile today is what the original Macintosh did for computing back in 1984- change the game in terms of user expectations around the required experience.  Enterprise computing is changing to look more like the iPhone and iPad market.

Below is an illustration of what is happening.  Rapid innovation around applications that is spawn new data.  This new data is the powerful new disruptor or Data Is The New Developer Kit of which I’ve written in the past many times.  How developers leverage data will determine how to make their applications more successful.

How they iterate the data feedback cycle is key.   I call it the Mobile Application Innovation Cycle.

UPDATE: David Vellante Industry Analyst at Wikibon Project has his angle on this deal here.

Dave Vellante says:

The market has shifted as of late moving toward integrated appliances and this move gives EMC a very important arrow in its quiver to compete with the likes of Oracle/Exadata, HP/Microsoft, IBM and others.

My quick take:

*Business analytics is becoming a mission critical discipline within organizations
*Peformance is critical
*The workload (BI/Data Warehousing) is a memory, CPU and disk hog
*Practitioners indicate performance constraints are a huge gate to achieving desired business value
*The holy grail of the business is real time analytics

Bottom line: EMC recognizes the importance of the BI/analytics/data warehouse space and is making moves to guarantee that its storage doesn’t get squeezed out of the picture.

Users will want to see:
*Optimized sytems
*Smokin’ fast performance
*Reference architectures (or what EMC calls Proven Solutions)
*Scale
*Federation capabilities; not just big honking systems.

Good move by EMC even if it did pay a premium. The value of this asset will only go up in my view.