EMC buys Greenplum – But how reliable are analytics without MDM?

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The hot news in the “Big Data” world this afternoon is the acquisition of Greenplum by EMC. Greenplum has been one of the major high performance analytics players focusing on “Big Data” (see my analysis of Greenplum’s Enterprise Data Cloud strategy last year). A few of the others being Aster Data, Cloudera (and Hadoop), ParAccel and Vertica. The space also has established giants in the form of integrated Data Warehousing Appliances, such as Teradata, Netezza and Oracle with (Sun) Exadata.

Clearly this was a bit of a surprise to many, including Curt Monash of DBMS2 who tweeted (you can read a more serious Curt review of the acquisition here):

Holy shit. EMC is acquiring Greenplum. http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2010/20100706-01.htm Neither side told me in advance, of course.

Apart from the generic press release typically issued for such events, Chuck Hollis VP — Global Marketing CTO at EMC Corporation sheds more light in his blog around what the acquisition means for EMC, and for partners such as ParAccel (ominously mispelled ParAccell in Chuck’s blog) who clearly must not be pleased about this turn of events. More details around the ParAccel “Scalable Analytic Appliance” can be found here on the EMC Solution Gallery.

Merv Adrian of IT Strategies noted in a tweet:

#ParAccel Scalable Analytic Appliance was partnership w #EMC. New version was expected. #Greenplum Deal a blow: EMC promises an appliance.

But the most interesting paragraph in Chuck’s Blog post listed “Many Targets For Value-Added Integration”
He writes:

If you think about it, we’ve got a very long list of candidate technologies that might be interesting to consider integrating in the future:

• All of EMC’s storage products are x86 based — this creates a potential pathway where data intensive functions could be run closer to the information, freeing the compute farm to do what it does best.
  
• Enormous data warehouses also need to be backed up, archived and otherwise protected — although the concerns and priorities are usually somewhat different than traditional OLTP applications.
  
• The vast majority of these data warehouses contain sensitive information and produce analysis that is either confidential or otherwise privileged.  Think information security and data loss prevention, for example.
  
• Much of the higher-order analysis produces rich content that frequently drives a collaborative workflow among knowledge workers.  Think about EMC’s assets in content management, collaborative workflows and case management.
  
• And, finally, let’s not forget the seductive appeal of running on-demand business analytics as yet another fully virtualized workload use dynamic resources in a private cloud model.  Like running on a good-sized Vblock, for example.

While many companies might be scrambling around reading into those bullets and sizing up their opportunities to also be acquired by EMC, conspicuous by it’s absence is any mention of Master Data Management (MDM).

As many of us who are and have been in the MDM world know (Disclosure: I used to be the VP of Product Marketing for Siperian – acquired by Informatica), MDM is a critical component of an enterprise data management strategy to ensure that the dimensions utilized by high performance analytics and data warehouses are accurate. MDM, which started out as Customer Data Integration (CDI), has seen many of its initial successes and popularity from demonstrating that it is critical to ensure that reference data fed into expensive high-end analytics are true and accurate. Otherwise you could be analyzing garbage.

Of course Informatica and IBM realized this via their respective MDM acquistions last year (in the case of IBM, they acquired DWL as far back as 2005). So it’s rather strange that EMC, who own Enterprise Content Management (ECM) giant Documentum, which could be considered MDM for unstructured data, has to date not made any moves in this particular area. Even more surprising given that EMC Consulting (as part of the BusinessEdge acquisition) have been very active as System Integration experts in the area of MDM.

All this is food for thought and fun to speculate, especially since we haven’t had an MDM acquisition for a while since Tibco bought Netrics.
So let’s reinvigorate the speculation and ask the question once again, MDM M&A Candidates, Who’s Who of Who’s Left and Who’s Next?

Meanwhile, I’m also eagerly awaiting Rob Karel of Forrester’s take on his blog.

P.S.
At least EMC are doing something … another tweet from Boris Evelson of Forrester mentions what we are all thinking about HP:

EMC acquires Greenplum #DW http://bit.ly/cSvP6p #ETL #MDM #BI are sure to follow. HP is once again sitting on its laurels.

P.P.S

A list of the major bloggers and their thoughts around the acquisition:

1)      EMC’s CTO, Chuck Hollis – http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2010/07/emc-to-acquire-greenplum.html

2)      Netezza’s response to EMC/Greenplum acquisition – from Phil Francisco (VP Prod Mgmnt, Netezza) http://www.enzeecommunity.com/blogs/nzblog/2010/07/07/emc-swallows-a-green-plum

3)      Merv Adrian – http://mervadrian.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/emc-buys-greenplum-big-data-realignment-continues/

4)      Curt Monash – http://www.dbms2.com/2010/07/06/emc-is-buying-greenplum/

5)      Rob Karel – http://blogs.forrester.com/rob_karel/10-07-07-emc_moving_tackle_data_management_market

6)      James Kobius – http://blogs.forrester.com/james_kobielus/10-07-06-emc_acquiring_greenplum_paving_way_emergence_virtualized_cloud_data_warehousing

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