EMC and its VMware subsidiary are planning on grouping their collective data analytics and cloud applications into a separate entity, termed the Pivotal Initiative, headed by EMC chief strategy officer Paul Maritz. The process will be complete by the second quarter of 2013, according to EMC. The initiative will absorb employees and resources from EMC’s Greenplum and Pivotal Labs organizations, along with VMware’s vFabric, Cloud Foundry and Cetas units—some 1,400 employees in total. More updates are apparently forthcoming in the first quarter of next year. “We are experiencing a major change in the wide scale move to cloud computing, which includes both infrastructural transformation and transformation of how applications will be built and used based on cloud, mobility and big data,” read a Dec. 4 note on Greenplum’s official blog. “There is a significant opportunity for both VMware and EMC to provide thought and technology leadership,” added the blog posting, “not only at the infrastructure level, but across the rapidly growing and fast-moving application development and big data markets.” By merging multiple divisions into one entity, EMC could avoid cannibalistic overlap between various products. Consolidating employees and software platforms under one roof could also streamline the research and development process, and allow ideas to more easily permeate across product lines. As early as this summer, rumors circulated that VMware planned to spin off some of its cloud properties into a separate company that would also include assets from EMC. According to unnamed sources speaking to GigaOm, the assets under consideration included Project Rubicon, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, as well as EMC’s Greenplum data-analytics property. Even as that deal evidently progressed behind closed doors, EMC worked to buttress its analytics capabilities, announcing a partnership with Alpine Data Labs in September that would integrate the latter’s predictive-analytics application into the Greenplum analytics platform. Nor was that EMC’s only alliance: in July, it announced one with Attunity over a data-replication solution for the Greenplum platform, with the combined solution allowing companies to mine data in a timelier manner. Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock.com EMC, VMware Creating New Cloud, Big Data Unit
EMC and its VMware subsidiary are planning on grouping their collective data analytics and cloud applications into a separate entity, termed the Pivotal Initiative, headed by EMC chief strategy officer Paul Maritz. The process will be complete by the second quarter of 2013, according to EMC. The initiative will absorb employees and resources from EMC’s Greenplum and Pivotal Labs organizations, along with VMware’s vFabric, Cloud Foundry and Cetas units—some 1,400 employees in total. More updates are apparently forthcoming in the first quarter of next year. “We are experiencing a major change in the wide scale move to cloud computing, which includes both infrastructural transformation and transformation of how applications will be built and used based on cloud, mobility and big data,” read a Dec. 4 note on Greenplum’s official blog. “There is a significant opportunity for both VMware and EMC to provide thought and technology leadership,” added the blog posting, “not only at the infrastructure level, but across the rapidly growing and fast-moving application development and big data markets.” By merging multiple divisions into one entity, EMC could avoid cannibalistic overlap between various products. Consolidating employees and software platforms under one roof could also streamline the research and development process, and allow ideas to more easily permeate across product lines. As early as this summer, rumors circulated that VMware planned to spin off some of its cloud properties into a separate company that would also include assets from EMC. According to unnamed sources speaking to GigaOm, the assets under consideration included Project Rubicon, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, as well as EMC’s Greenplum data-analytics property. Even as that deal evidently progressed behind closed doors, EMC worked to buttress its analytics capabilities, announcing a partnership with Alpine Data Labs in September that would integrate the latter’s predictive-analytics application into the Greenplum analytics platform. Nor was that EMC’s only alliance: in July, it announced one with Attunity over a data-replication solution for the Greenplum platform, with the combined solution allowing companies to mine data in a timelier manner. Image: Lightspring/Shutterstock.com 
