When COO Pat Gelsinger asked Brian Gallagher, head of EMC’s enterprise storage division, to examine the data analytics and data warehouse space in December 2009, it didn’t take long for Gallagher to pinpoint where the innovation in that market was coming from.

It wasn’t from the mega-vendors – Oracle, IBM, Teradata and Microsoft – but from a handful of less well-known start-ups that were changing the data analytics paradigm. And EMC would soon make a key acquisition that is now propelling them into the heart of the Big Data Era.

“A lot of the guys in the emergent [data warehouse] player space had left some of the bigger companies because they couldn’t solve some of the architectural problems with the older models, the DBMS systems,” said Gallagher, speaking with Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier from the floor of EMC World 2011.

Among this middle layer of “emergent players,” as Gallagher calls them, were Netezza, Vertica, Aster Data and ParAccel. But the one that stood out from the pack, according to Gallagher, was Greenplum.

“When we looked at Greenplum, they were the most compelling technology out there: MPP, shared-nothing, mixed columnar and row capabilities,” Gallagher said live on theCube. In addition to the technology, Greenplum, headed by Luc Lonergan and Scott Yara, also had some of the smartest engineers working in the data warehouse and analytics space.

“The IQ of the people was just tremendous,” Gallagher said. “Net-net they were by far the best technically, best [intellectual property], the best IQ in the bunch.”

Last December, EMC acquired Greenplum, ushering in yet another transformational period for a company once known strictly for its storage technology. Gallagher said EMC wants to be pervasive in the enterprise, and that means entering emerging markets like the MPP data warehouse space as well as the very hot but still developing commercial Hadoop market.

In addition to analytics, EMC is also tapping the cloud to help enterprises improve collaboration capabilities its VPLEX Geo line. “VPLEX Geo, Gallagher said, is “making it seem like people are literally in the same office when they may be in different locations around the globe.”

The bottom line is that EMC’s latest transformation is in full swing. As Gallagher succinctly put it, “EMC is not afraid of change.”