EMC acquires app development management firm Pivotal Labs

EMC announced Tuesday that it has acquired application development consultancy, Pivotal Labs, which will help Greenplum customers more quickly develop software for big data business analytics through the use of methodologies and programming frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.

The financial details around the all-cash acquisition of the privately-held Pivotal Labs were not disclosed.

EMC also announced Greenplum Chorus, an open-source, social networking-style toolset for Big Data application development. The platform is focused on enabling data science teams to collaborate on datasets in a manner similar to Facebook.

Greenplum, which EMC acquired last year, built a large-scale data warehousing and analytics database based on a MapReduce software framework. "Pivotal will accelerate the development and adoption of Big Data applications in the enterprise," EMC said.

Greenplum Chorus is part of the OpenChorus Initiative, an industry effort to foster widespread development of social-enabled, purpose-built Big Data apps for the open-source community.

The Greenplum Chorus source code will be released under an open-source license in the second half of 2012.

Michael Maxey, senior director of product marketing at EMC Greenplum, said Pivotal Labs helped Greenplum develop Chorus, its first user interface. That made acquiring the company a natural fit.

While Pivotal Labs has intellectual property in its PivotalTracker software product, the company's fundamental business revolves around partnering with companies to assist in application development.

Founded in 1989, Pivotal Labs has more than 240,000 customers using its Pivotal Tracker software development tool, including Groupon, Best Buy, Salesfore.com and Twitter.