Tuesday, March 20, 2012

EMC Acquires Pivotal Labs

Why Auditors Care: This is another step in the right direction to tackle the challenge of complex data analysis characterized by our IT infrastructures. Developers need tools to engage large disparate data sets and create solutions. My discussion is on the data produced by the infrastructure components, not the data housed by the infrastructure, which tends to be the focus of 'Big Data' discussions.


Excerpt from Full Story:
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. Today 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.


News Summary:
  • EMC has acquired San Francisco-based Pivotal Labs, a privately-held provider of agile software development services and tools. 
  • EMC will invest to expand Pivotal’s reach on a global scale, bringing Pivotal’s agile consulting services expertise to an even greater number of both emerging start-ups and the world's largest businesses looking to embrace Cloud, Big Data, Social and Mobile in developing next-generation applications. 
  • Pivotal’s agile project management tool (Pivotal Tracker) is currently used by over 240,000 developers around the world. EMC plans to continue to invest in Pivotal Tracker to accelerate innovation in the platform and increase adoption. 
  • With the addition of Pivotal, EMC adds to its portfolio the gold-standard in agile software development for customers building ‘Big Data’ analytic applications. 
  • 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.
  • An online event titled “Social Meets Big Data: Live Webcast ” with executives from EMC and Pivotal Labs will be broadcast today, Tuesday, March 20 - 9:45 A.M. Pacific, 12:45 P.M. Eastern and 4:45 P.M GMT.  Event details can be found at http://bit.ly/qduws  or at EMC.com.