EMC Acquires Pivotal Labs
EMC announced it has acquired San Francisco-based Pivotal Labs, a privately-held provider of agile software development services and tools. The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2012 fiscal year. Pivotal Labs enhances EMC’s powerful portfolio of products and services, which are designed to enable organizations to store, analyze and take action on ‘Big Data’ — datasets so large they break traditional IT infrastructures.
Earlier this year, EMC introduced the Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) that delivered, for the first time, a scale-out infrastructure for analyzing both structured and unstructured data. On March 20, 2012, EMC announced general availability of Greenplum Chorus — another industry first, delivering a Facebook-like social collaboration tool for Data Science teams to iterate on the development of datasets and ensure that useful insights are delivered to the business quickly. EMC brought Data Science and its chief practitioner — the Data Scientist — to the fore a year ago at the world’s first Data Scientist Summit. With the addition of Pivotal Labs, EMC can now take datasets perfected in Greenplum Chorus and enable customers to rapidly build out Big Data applications using modern programming environments such as Ruby on Rails.
Big Data is new — so new in fact, that packaged Big Data applications are scarce. Most organizations dump large volumes of data into stores like Hadoop and write custom code to extract value. However, now with Pivotal Labs, the leader in agile development practices that embrace rapid iteration, test-driven development, open source tools and modern frameworks, both start-ups and global enterprise customers will have the ability to quickly build new applications and services that capitalize on Big Data.
Founded in 1989, Pivotal Labs brings to EMC a highly differentiated and best-in-class software development methodology; world-class engineering talent in Web, mobile, Big Data and cloud services; and 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. In keeping with prior successful acquisitions, EMC will invest in and organize Pivotal Labs so it can scale its business through demand driven from EMC.
“I’ve had the opportunity to watch Pivotal Labs for many years and have seen, first-hand, the transformational impact they deliver to their clients. Their cultural and strategic contributions at Twitter have been quite meaningful, and much of our software development process at Square is modeled on the Pivotal Labs way. I have no doubt Pivotal Labs will bring great value to EMC and its customers,” said Jack Dorsey, Executive Chairman of Twitter and CEO of Square.
“Last year, we began work with Pivotal Labs on advanced development for EMC Greenplum Chorus, which ultimately opened data science teams up to an entirely new way to collaborate through socially-enabled tools and techniques. The transformative power of what we, together, could achieve for customers became quickly and abundantly clear. We’re incredibly energized about the opportunity to grow this business even further, and to help customers accelerate their quest for new levels of agility and increasingly meaningful data-driven insights,” stated Bill Cook, President and General Manager of Greenplum, a division of EMC.
“We are thrilled to join EMC and look forward to accelerated innovation on Pivotal Tracker, expansion of our services, and the ability to offer a greater number of customers access to our proven methods of developing high quality, reliable software. Working with the Greenplum division to apply our unique development process to the challenges of Big Data is especially exciting for us,” added Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal Labs.
About Greenplum
Greenplum, a division of EMC, is driving the future of Big Data analytics with breakthrough products including Greenplum Data Computing Appliance, Greenplum Database, Greenplum Community Edition, Greenplum HD, and Greenplum Chorus — the industry’s first Enterprise Data Cloud platform. The division’s products embody the power of open systems, cloud computing, virtualization and social collaboration — enabling global organizations to gain greater insight and value from their data than ever before possible.
