EMC Buys Pivotal Labs for Big Data Capabilities

EMC Corp. has acquired Pivotal Labs, a Big Data specialist that offers software development services. The acquisition is one of two recent announcements from EMC that involve Big Data…

First, the details on the Pivotal Labs acquisition. EMC claims that Pivotal Labs is the “gold-standard in agile software development” for Big Data. For those who don’t know the term, “Big Data” is used to describe sets of data that are so large that they often break through the tools used inside of traditional IT infrastructures. And as a result, companies often miss the most critical business information that they can get from those large data sets.

So how is Pivotal Labs going to help IT EMC quell the Big Data crisis? Pivotal Labs uses different programming frameworks to help businesses (EMC in this case) quickly develop Big Data applications and tools for enterprises. And as a result, enterprises can leverage those Big Data applications more quickly than they normally would.

But the problem around Big Data is more than just capturing the right information. Enterprises also struggle to share their Big Data information. To that end, EMC has developed Greenplum Chorus, which the company says is the “first social toolset for Big Data.”

Greenplum Chorus lets administrators share and discuss sets of data in much the same way people share and discuss topics on Facebook. And during the second half of 2012, EMC will unveil another collaboration tool for enterprises called OpenChorus. OpenChorus will run on the Greenplum Chorus collaboration platform. So Greenplum will now run as a division of EMC. And according to Greenplum Senior VP of Products Scott Yara, the platform will help businesses gain the most valuable insight from their data.

“It [Greenplum] touches a lot of people inside an organization,” Yara said in a prepared statement. “While most of the industry is focused on loading speeds, processing times and so on, EMC is taking the lead on’socializing’ Big Data analytics.”