EMC has announced plans to acquire Greenplum, which has developed “big data” technology and analytics. The deal will form the basis for a new product division focused on data computing inside EMC’s Information Infrastructure business, the company said. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, although published reports put the price tag at more than US$300 million. According to EMC, Greenplum outperforms traditional database software by a factor of 10 to 100. Analysis firm IDC has predicted that over the next 10 years, the amount of data created each year will increase by a factor of 44 times, creating the “big data” problem. The transaction is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to regulatory approval, with no impact on EMC’s earnings per share for 2010. Bill Cook, Greenplum CEO and former senior vice president of U.S. sales at Sun (which was an early investor in Greenplum), will lead EMC’s new data computing product division.
Product development software provider Atlassian announced it has closed a US$60 million investment from venture capital firm Accel Partners. In an announcement, Atlassian said it will use the funds to speed expansion into European and Asian markets, as well as to add complementary products to its software portfolio. Atlassian was founded in 2002 by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar; they will remain co-CEOs as Accel Partners’ Rich Wong joins the board of directors. Atlassian makes JIRA for defect tracking, Confluence for enterprise wiki collaboration, and many other developer productivity tools.
