it sells much of the storage and networking hardware that many large companies’ data warehouses live on.
“EMC and Greenplum are partners already,” says Dave Farmer, an EMC public relations spokesperson. “So when we were looking at this space and deciding that we wanted to make a more substantive offering in the space, we were already very close to Greenplum, and as we looked closer and deeper, they very quickly rose to the top of the potential candidates.”
Greenplum’s 140 employees will remain based in San Mateo, Farmer says. The seven-year-old startup will form the core of a new data computing products division headed by Greenplum CEO Bill Cook, who will report directly to Pat Gelsinger, the president and chief operating officer of EMC’s Information Infrastructure Products division. (Gelsinger basically oversees all EMC products except for the VMware virtualization software subsidiary).
Farmer says EMC will invest in expanding the sales and R&D staffs at Greenplum, and may even acquire more companies in the data warehousing area. EMC isn’t saying how much it spent to buy the startup, which had raised at least $61 million from a syndicate of venture firms and strategic partners including Dawntreader Ventures, EDF Ventures, Hudson Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, Mission Ventures, SAP Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Sun Microsystems (now part of Oracle). But the acquisition price isn’t enough to have a material impact on the company’s earnings-per-share numbers, Farmer says.
Gelsinger said in a statement yesterday that “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.”
