Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.
EMC Is Buying Greenplum
I 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.
3 Min Read
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
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: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 $300-400 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.I 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.
About the Author
You May Also Like
More Insights
