July 7, 2010
More on Greenplum and EMC
I talked with Ben Werther of Greenplum for about 40 minutes, which was my first post-merger Greenplum/EMC briefing. “Historical” highlights include:
- Ben says Greenplum wasn’t being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum’s deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.
- However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another …
- Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.
- A typical “small” paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.
- Greenplum Chorus isn’t generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won’t be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.
Highlights looking forward include:
- When I challenged him, Ben sounded quite optimistic that Pat Gelsinger will immunize Greenplum against and generally counteract some of EMC’s traditionally stifling bureaucracy. (My words, of course, not his.)
- The initial Greenplum/EMC product vision appears truly centered around “private cloud,” specifically including Greenplum, VMware, and EMC storage arrays.
- Some other areas of potential Greenplum/EMC technical synergy I think are cool obviously haven’t been seriously addressed yet.
- Based on what I heard from Ben about the aura around the deal and also on what I know of the individual executives at Greenplum, I think each of them is a good bet to stick around EMC for a while. (That’s on average. Of course, it would be surprising if 100% of them stayed around very long.) Basically, there’s at least a chance EMC/Greenplum will do some pretty cool stuff, and most of the guys will probably stick around to see if that actually starts to happen.*
*Also, when they do eventually leave, they’ll surely say things to the effect “The cool stuff is well underway; my work here is done.” That party line is almost guaranteed, no matter how things unfold in reality. 🙂
Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Market share and customer counts
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7 Responses to “More on Greenplum and EMC”
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“will immunize Greenplum against and generally counteract some of EMC’s traditionally stifling bureaucracy.”
Full disclosure I’m an EMC employee.
Stifling bureaucracy is a historical view when you look at how divisions such as VMware, RSA and Data Domain (Backup Recovery Systems) are operating today.
EMC doesn’t look to acquire products, it looks to acquire talent, expertise and experience. As such I look forward to the Greenplum team leading EMC into new markets by acting as the heart of the what will be a growing Data Computing Product Division.
@Storagezilla,
I hope you’re right! But I was also referring to the 10s of EMC employees who can get involved in deciding whether to move forward with one partnership agreement. That’s VERY recent history …
@Curt
You’d be surprised at how people no longer get the urge to form an exploratory committee when Pat says he wants something done.
Wonder what this means for Greenplum’s average selling price, now that they will be paired/sold with the premium priced storage vendor.
http://bit.ly/bDpQc4 as one data point.
Let’s hope Greenplum software stays available for download and that ‘roll-your-own’ MPP systems in which OS, server and storage can be setup as required (within limits of course!) continue to be possible.
Anyway, well done to Luke and team.
With respect to any acquisition of a smaller company by a much larger company. Some words of advice to the employees being integrated into the larger company. In this case EMC buying the smaller Greenplum. I’ve been thru several acquisitions in my career. Here some thoughts.
– Be open minded
– Don’t bitch about the processes, expense system or email system, etc. Not worth it. It is what it is.
– Be willing to adjust
– Take advantage of every opportunity in the new company including training, etc.
– Try to help make the integration go smooth in any way you can.
– Be a leader
– Have fun and stay focused. You still have to continue to build and ship the product your acquirer just bought.
I’m sure others might pipe in on this with advice. As many folks that follow this blog have been thru acquisitions.
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