Greenplum Pushes Enterprise Data Cloud Initiative

Greenplum is changing its pitch around its data warehousing technology, talking up what the database company calls its “enterprise data cloud” initiative.

The idea behind pushing an EDC (Enterprise Data Cloud) platform is to enable enterprises to create and manage data warehouses and marts that can be deployed across a common pool of physical, virtual or public cloud infrastructure. Underlying this vision are three things: massively parallel analytic processing, enhanced scalability to support large amounts of data and a final piece called “self-service provisioning” that provides users the ability to provision new data warehouses with a single click.

“At the heart of this is this new idea we call self-service,” said Ben Werther, director of product management at Greenplum. “This initiative is about bringing this vision for self-service to data warehousing and analytics in a way that really hasn’t been done before.”

Under this umbrella, the company announced a feature-update for its database software. In Greenplum 3.3, the company added online expansion, enabling customers to add servers to a database system and expand across the new servers while the system is online and responding to queries. Greenplum also enhanced management commands and now ships with an enhanced version of the open-source administration and development platform pgAdmin III.

In some ways, Greenplum’s vision is not all that much different from what its competitors at companies such as Teradata and DATAllegro (now Microsoft) have been saying. However, the latest release gives the company a way to tighten up its in-database mining story, noted Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus.

“In a sense this keeps Greenplum in this very hot game of supporting ever-faster mining within the database, within the data warehouse,” Kobielus told eWEEK.

As part of the EDC initiative, Greenplum is assembling an ecosystem of customers and partners who are collaborating with the company to create new technologies and standards that leverage the capabilities of the EDC platform, including Informatica and EMC.

“EMC and Greenplum share a common vision for the future of computing, one in which information is becoming the single most important asset to a business,” said Chuck Hollis, EMC vice president and global marketing chief technology officer, in a statement. “Greenplum’s Enterprise Data Cloud initiative is a major step forward in the realization of comprehensive cloud computing capability in the data center.”