More on Greenplum and EMC

Ben says Greenplum wasn't being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum's deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.

However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another...

Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.

A typical "small" paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.

Greenplum Chorus isn't generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won't be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.

When I challenged him, Ben sounded quite optimistic that Pat Gelsinger will immunize Greenplum against and generally counteract some of EMC's traditionally stifling bureaucracy. (My words, of course, not his.)

The initial Greenplum/EMC product vision appears truly centered around "private cloud," specifically including Greenplum, VMware, and EMC storage arrays.

Some other areas of potential Greenplum/EMC technical synergy I think are cool obviously haven't been seriously addressed yet.

Based on what I heard from Ben about the aura around the deal and also on what I know of the individual executives at Greenplum, I think each of them is a good bet to stick around EMC for a while. (That's on average. Of course, it would be surprising if 100% of them stayed around very long.) Basically, there's at least a chance EMC/Greenplum will do some pretty cool stuff, and most of the guys will probably stick around to see if that actually starts to happen.*