EMC acquires pivotal labs

EMC Corporation today 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. 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.

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.