The data boom is making analytics companies some of the hottest properties in the market. That’s evident from today’s news that EMC is buying Greenplum, a data warehouse, big data and analytics company used by Skype, T-Mobile and a host of companies including NASDAQ and Fox Interactive Media.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Greenplum is a privately held company that has raised $61 million in venture financing. Greenplum is just 7 years old but, according to eWeek, already has proved a formidable challenger to such technology giants as Oracle, which ironically has an investment in the company.
Greenplum has made its bigget mark by serving companies with large amounts of data in the cloud. The technology will serve as the key underpinning of a new data computing product division within EMC’s Information Infrastructure business.
Data warehousing and analytics are becoming a potent combination for large scale processing of data. Hadoop has gained considerable traction with its distributed storage capabilities.
Companies with in-memory technologies are getting more attention. SAP made it a center piece of discussion at SAP Sapphire. In March, Tibco updated its Spotfire application. SAS announced an in-memory analytics technology last month. IBM continues making acquisitions with a focus on analytics. Last month, the company announced how companies such as RTL Nederland, an entertainment company, is using IBM social analytics tools to gain feedback and in turn change the nature of its programming.
All these companies recognize the problems that come with the massive amount of data that people produce. It’s just the beginning as more of our world connects through the Web and beyond to all forms of physical objects. According to IDC, the amount of digital data created annually will grow 44 times.
For EMC, the crown jewel is Greenplum’s massive parallel processing architecture. According to EMC, the technology is capable of delivering 10 to 100 times the performance of traditional database software.
