EMC Intros Chorus Open-Source Big Data App

The company also confirmed reports that it acquired San Francisco-based Pivotal Labs, a developer of software for enterprise, mobile, and Web businesses using the Agile software development methods.

EMC's new Greenplum Chorus is a social media-based collaboration tool targeting teams developing big data tools to get useful insights from ever-increasing amounts of stored data.

[Related: EMC, NetApp Go Open Source With Hadoop ].

EMC in 2010 acquired data warehousing developer Greenplum, and has since made Greenplum the centerpiece of its big data management strategy.

Pat Gelsinger, president and COO of EMC's information infrastructure products, said that companies are seeing big data more and more at the core of their businesses.

"Our agenda today is to make this available to any business," Gelsinger said. "And not just the Fortune 200 or Fortune 2000 (businesses)."

Greenplum Chorus provides a platform that enables teams to find, understand, and import data from anywhere in an organization using social media tools. Teams can collaborate by self-provisioning workspaces on-the-fly to create and share insights, Gelsinger said.

While Greenplum Chorus has been in development for some time using Agile development tools, the company was falling behind in its plans, Gelsinger said. As a result, it engaged Pivotal Labs to speed up development, and in the process discovered a lack of big data applications.

As a result, he said, EMC decided to acquire Pivotal Labs to start a wave of innovation. "We see there will have to be predictive big data apps going forward," he said.

Given the amount of open-source development going on around big data, EMC also decided to hand Greenplum Chorus to the open-source community sometime in the second half of 2012, Gelsinger said.

The move will be EMC's first time to contribute a project to the open-source community, Gelsinger said. However, it is not the first time EMC has worked with open source. The company currently works with projects such as Hadoop, the open-source big data project.

EMC nearly a year ago unveiled the Greenplum HD Data Computing Appliance, a purpose-built, high-performance, Hadoop appliance for co-processing both structured and unstructured data within a single solution. The company also introduced two Hadoop-based software applications for big data management.