Well the EMC behemoth trundles along like an unstoppable train and picks up another company in the shape of Greenplum. That opening statement is open to interpretation as to be honest do I really think EMC is an “unstoppable train”; no not really it is a clear and calculating agile company that only picks up pieces along its journey that ultimately form an end goal. Currently I think the end goal is to be the Cloud partner of choice but then I could be wrong.
So Greenplum well were to start, with regards to DW DB (Data Warehouse Database) Managements Systems its getting there if the Gartner Magic Quadrant from January 2010 is to be believed and to be hones they are not normally too far off the pace. It’s an MPP data warehouse DBMS based on open-source and has just over 100 customers worldwide currently (you would expect that to increase now it comes under the EMC umbrella).
It was the first company to deliver a DBMS solution for use in a private cloud infrastructure and people like Teradata have since followed suit. It regular competes against IBM, Oracle and Teradata and probably has lost out in customers before due to the fact it has a small customer base and hasn’t had a huge push behind it but guess what it has now.
So how do I see it fitting into EMC, well as I don’t work for EMC my thoughts are purely speculative, so a read of Chuck’s blog will maybe give some insight as I see he has already posted something on this topic.
http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2010/07/emc-to-acquire-greenplum.html
The plan as I see it from reading press releases and looking at Greenplum’s own website is that it will become the foundation of the new Data Computing Product Division.
I actually see Greenplum being absorbed into the EMC family very well which can only benefit Greenplum and its existing customer base. The amount of available R&D funding will increase significantly which will allow for all those fixes and enhancements that Greenplum pushed to the back burner to be brought forward. The likes of Netezza will now have a competitor with huge backing and could see their market share start to be impacted, as for others such as Oracle and IBM I am not sure they will see any major hit against them in the short term. But then again who knows it all depends on how the offering is marketed and enhanced by the overall EMC product set.
The big question that springs to my mind and maybe I am jumping the gun slightly but who will be next, I have a feeling maybe incorrectly that there will a bigger purchase by EMC before the end of the year to take their overall cloud offering even further forward.
So watch this space as they say………
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