EMC Corporation, a provider of information and storage infrastructure solutions, announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire California-based Greenplum, Inc. Greenplum is a privately-held provider of data warehousing technology, and a key enabler of "big data" clouds and self-service analytics. Upon completion of the acquisition, Greenplum will form the foundation of a new data computing product division within EMC's Information Infrastructure business.

Greenplum supports a "shared-nothing" massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that has been designed from the ground up for analytical processing using virtualized x86 infrastructure.

"The data warehousing world is about to change," says Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer for EMC Information Infrastructure Products. "Greenplum's massively-parallel, scale-out architecture, along with its self-service consumption model, has enabled it to separate itself from the incumbent players and emerge as the leader in this industry shift toward big-data analytics."

The acquisition of Greenplum will be an all-cash transaction and is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2010, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. EMC will continue to offer Greenplum's full product portfolio to customers, well as an integrated hardware and software offerings.

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