"Data analytics," said Greenplum co-founder Scott Yara, "is the killer app of cloud computing."
mercurynews.com
Greenplum expects bright future
By Scott Duke Harris
MercuryNews.com
sdharris@mercurynews.com
Posted: 07/07/2010 06:33:10 PM PDT
To understand why storage giant EMC this week decided a San Mateo startup called Greenplum was ripe for the plucking, consider the cacophony of information in modern life and the need to separate the signal from the noise.
"Data analytics," said Greenplum co-founder Scott Yara, "is the killer app of cloud computing."
In other words: Turning factoids into intelligence is the premium opportunity in an era in which information technology is moving increasingly from desktop and networked computers to the Internet "cloud." Greenplum client T-Mobile, for example, is now better able to understand its "churn rate," or why some customers leave and others stay.
The opportunity is such that Greenplum CEO Bill Cook said he expects that his work force of 140 employees will double in size in the coming year as EMC invests in its new data computing division. Cook will continue to be at the helm of the operation, which remains in San Mateo.
The financial terms were not disclosed in the all-cash deal. But analysts and tech bloggers suggest that EMC, which last year paid a premium to acquire Data Domain after a bidding war with NetApp, paid a handsome price to muscle up for a contest with giants such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft in the $20 billion-a-year database market.
Greenplum, which was founded in 2003 and introduced its first product in 2006, now claims more than 100 customers, including government intelligence agencies its executive declines to identify. EMC's interests, observers said, reflect both the significance of what has been dubbed "Big Data" and the complementary shift to "cloud computing."
Hype about this shift has led to what's been dubbed "cloud confusion," as Forrester Research put it in a new market analysis this week. But Forrester says the trend is powerful: "a sustainable, long-term IT paradigm, and the successor to previous mainframe, client/server, and network computing eras. Underpinned by both technology and economic disruptions, the cloud will fundamentally change the way technology providers engage with business customers and individual users."
Indeed, every few days there seems to be another news story that reflects the trend. Last week, New Enterprise Associates led a $20 million investment in Eucalyptus Systems, a Santa Barbara-based creator of open-source cloud software. Eucalyptus is led by Mårten Mickos, who had a billion-dollar success as CEO of MySQL. Mickos described cloud computing as a shift "more significant than anything we've previously seen."
In a blog posting, Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg noted that, buried deep in EMC's news release, was the hint that the acquisition will lead to the introduction of a new appliance. "Stay tuned," Cook said.
EMC, which already owns a controlling stake in VMware, has aligned itself with Cisco Systems as tech giants battle for cloud supremacy. In the much narrower database market, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft — which Kellogg says dominate 90 percent of the market — now face a challenge by EMC and SAP, with its recent acquisition of Sybase. Meanwhile, niche startups like Mark Logic, which specializes in making sense of unstructured data like e-mail, "are trying to bite an ear off this $20 billion market."
To hear Kellogg describe it, Big Data makes for Big Bucks and Big Fun. "The big three oligopoly," he blogged, "should not sleep too soundly at night." |
