EMC Acquires Pivital Labs and Announces Availability of Greenplum Chorus

EMC has announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based Pivotal Labs, a privately-held provider of agile software development services and tools. Pivotal Labs enhances EMC’s portfolio of products and services, which enable organizations to store, analyze, and take action on Big Data. The transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the remainder of the 2012 fiscal year.

EMC has announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based Pivotal Labs, a privately-held provider of agile software development services and tools. Pivotal Labs enhances EMC’s portfolio of products and services, which enable organizations to store, analyze, and take action on Big Data. The transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the remainder of the 2012 fiscal year.

Because Big Data is new to the market, their associated applications are very rare. Previously, organizations dumped large volumes of data into stores such as Hadoop and then wrote custom code to extract value. Now, with Pivotal Labs, both start-ups and global enterprise customers will have the ability to quickly and efficiently build new applications and services that take advantage of Big Data.

Pivotal Labs brings EMC several new features:

• Highly differentiated and best-in-class software development methodology
• World-class engineering talent in web, mobile, Big Data and cloud services
• An industry-leading software development tool, Pivotal Tracker, with more than 240,000 developer customers worldwide

Pivotal’s customers include: Twitter, Best Buy, Groupon, Salesforce.com, EMI, Urban Dictionary, Linden Lab, Task Rabbit, The Annie E. Casey Foundation and many others. EMC has stated that it will invest in and organize Pivotal Labs so that it can scale its business through demand driven from EMC.

EMC also has announced the general availability of Greenplum Chorus, delivering a social collaboration tool (similar to Facebook) for Data Science teams to iterate on the development of datasets and ensure that useful insights are delivered to the business quickly. Additionally, EMC has announced the OpenChorus Initiative (openchorus.org), which is dedicated to accelerate innovation and adoption of collaborative and social data applications running on top of the Greenplum Chorus platform. The Greenplum Chorus source code will be released under an open source license sometime during second half of 2012; project updates on Open Chorus can be found here.

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