EMC is buying Greenplum
EMC is buying Greenplum. Most of the press release is a general recapitulation of Greenplum’s marketing messages, the main exceptions being (emphasis mine):
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.
Greenplum is one of my biggest vendor clients, and EMC is just becoming one, but of course neither side gave me a heads-up before the deal happened, nor have I yet been briefed subsequently. With those disclaimers out of the way, some of my early thoughts include:
- I wish my clients would never buy each other, but it’s inevitable.
- I don’t think anybody evaluating Greenplum should be much influenced by this deal one way or the other. (Whether they will be is of course a different matter.)
- EMC tends to run its bigger software acquisitions in a fairly hands-off manner. There’s no particular FUD (Fear/Uncertainty/Doubt) reason why this deal should stop anybody from buying Greenplum software.
- I also don’t think adding a rich parent adds much of a reason to buy from Greenplum. But if you’re the type who’s nervous about smaller vendors — well, Greenplum now isn’t so small.
- Greenplum Chorus could, in principle, work with non-Greenplum DBMS. That possibility suddenly looks a lot more realistic.
- The list of analytic DBMS vendors with an appliance orientation is pretty impressive, including:
- Oracle, with Exadata
- Microsoft, partially
- Teradata
- Netezza
- Now EMC/Greenplum, at least partially
- Weaker players such as:
- The ailing Kickfire, which a client (not Kickfire itself) tells me is being shopped around
- The reeling HP Neoview
- XtremeData, but I’m still waiting to hear of XtremeData’s first real sale
- Greenplum is something of a specialist in large databases. EMC has to love that.
- Greenplum’s weakness is concurrency.
- Greenplum’s “polymorphic storage” is a good fit for a storage vendor with appliance-y ideas.
- And finally — I think that even software-only analytic DBMS vendors should design their systems in an increasingly storage-aware manner, and have been advising my vendor clients of same. I’ll blog that line of reasoning separately when I get a chance, and edit in a link here after I do.
Related links (edit)
- Here’s the promised post as to why analytic DBMS need to be ever more storage-aware.
- Dave Kellogg crunched the EMC/Greenplum numbers, coming up with an estimated valuation range of $3-400 million, the high end of which is rumored to be correct.
- Merv Adrian suggests the big EMC/Greenplum loser is ParAccel, a viewpoint which presumably presupposes that the EMC/ParAccel partnership was significant in the first place.
- I talked with Ben Werther and posted more about Greenplum and EMC.
Comments
13 Responses to “EMC is buying Greenplum”
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Any thoughts on why EMC decided to buy GP and not someone else? There vast variety of players with all kind of flavors in market.
Greenplum probably manages more data than anybody else smaller than Teradata, Netezza not even necessarily excepted.
[…] EMC is buying Greenplum […]
Hi Curt- just a reminder in your list of Warehouse vendors – forgetting anyone ? (hint hint)
Also I would be very curious to hear what you think the market sweet spot is for the new combo of EMC/Greenplum. EDW? Analytical Marts? How do you think they will be able to compete in the appliance space?
cheers,
Nancy
Nancy,
Last I heard, IBM was a little less committed to an appliance or appliance-like strategy than most of the others. Of course, this could be an artifact of the fact that my briefings haven’t concluded yet (um, are we scheduling more?). 😉
Curt- yes absolutely, I am back from holiday so I will work with AR and get you briefed, look forward to it as we have some key announcements coming up I want to pre-brief you on in July.
And yes we are very committed to having an appliance solution to compete in the market. Today that solution is known as the Smart Analytics family which ranges across all platforms- Power, Linux on X and as of this month the mainframe.
Cheers,
Nancy
Applications in general need to be more storage aware, and vice versa…not just databases. I’ve been making that point with storage vendors for several years, not that any of them ever listen. It’s like talking to rocks.
EMC has had several years now to completely revolutionize storage with application awareness. It hasn’t really shown any genuine interest in it. To me this is just another product it wants to use to sell storage.
Joseph,
What would be some examples of application storage-awareness that data management stacks couldn’t handle properly?
Interesting that you mention concurrency a key factor in big data and what I call “little data” architectures. My angle is that this is about cloud data
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2010/07/06/big-data-clouds-are-here-emc-acquires-greenplum-move-counter-oracle/
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.
Finally it’s about exadata counter move against oracle and EMC looks at this like data domain but down at a different level with Greenplum. Data Domain filled a product hole but Greenplum is a feature against competitors offerings.
good post and i’m happy I found this blog..
good info thx
John
It was inevitable that EMC took control of the database, Greenplum notwithstanding. EMC plays excellent defense (in reference to Oracle above), but on offense there are few that have the strategic vision and competitive execution to match them. Hats off to EMC and Greenplum for exposing the infrastructure storage play and for putting another multi-billion dollar market in play. This market holds long term value that will operate and compete on very different attributes than the traditional BI/warehouse.
http://www.dbms2.com/2008/09/06/sans-vs-das-in-mpp-data-warehousing/
[…] both denies the concurrency problems I previously noted and also has a very credible story as to how it will eliminate them. Seriously, […]
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