Greenplum, now EMC’s Data Computing Division, was founded on a vision of “bringing the processing closer to the data and closer to the people,” says the division’s VP of marketing, Richard Snee. In [http://www.siliconangle.tv/video/big-data-big-visions-richard-snee-greenplum-hadoop-and-enterprise-data-cloud an interview] on SiliconAngle.TV from Oracle OpenWorld 2010, he assured Wikibon.org co-founder and CEO David Vellante and SiliconAngle founder John Furrier that EMC and Greenplum are completely aligned as they move toward the future of computing and that “with the support of EMC, the possibilities are endless for us to realize the complete Greenplum vision around large scale data and analytics.”

[http://www.cloudera.com/company/press-center/releases/cloudera_and_emc_greenplum_team_up_to_expand_the_way_companies_collect_process_and_store_data The announcement] of the division’s partnership with Hadoop developer [http://www.cloudera.com/ CloudEra] at Oracle OpenWorld, just 60 days after Greenplum was acquired by EMC, is a major step in that direction, Mr. Snee says. The combination will allow companies to import massive amounts of unstructured as well as structured data into the Greenplum massively parallel data warehousing and analytics [http://www.greenplum.com/about-us/ “Enterprise Data Cloud”], where enterprises can analyze the information for decision support and other uses, to achieve the 360° view of activities that is often talked about but so far not achieved.

And by putting the analysis engine on a massively parallel platform that is fused to the data warehouse, the Enterprise Data Cloud architecture can increase the speed of processing to near real-time. That, said Mr. Vellante, is an important step forward from the present reality, in which analysis is always looking at the world from the rear view mirror, trying to project what is happening and what will happen based on data and analysis that is out of date before it is complete. That, Snee said, is the first part of the Greenplum vision, bringing the processing closer to the data. The second part, bringing it closer to users, “is where collaboration and virtualization come in.”

This is the new vision of computing, he said, an architecture that will not so much replace the existing OLTP/data warehouse infrastructure as sit beside it to work in parallel to provide that larger vision. “The data tsunami is here, and it’s only getting bigger,” Mr. Snee said. “I like to tell an anecdote about one of our very large customers, who says their traditional EDW only holds 10% of the data. The other 90% outside that EDW represents business innovation to them. So companies that are not looking at their data in that manner are going to lost traction and not have the competitive edge they need in today’s business world.”

“We believe that at EMC we are building the data system of the future, and that is about all of your data, all of your tools, and all of your people. So whether you are a solution provider or technology company, if you are not providing your customers with the ability to leverage all of that – all of their data and all of their tools – that is a mistake.”