See EMC's press release on the deal here. First, some takeaways from the press release and related coverage: * All cash transaction, valuation undisclosed. See below for some fun and math, trying to guestimate it from standard ratios. * Greenplum had raised $61M in venture capital. * EMC intends to create
Management
The ability to see both sides of an issue is a critical executive skill. Yet, in typical corporate America culture, that skill is all too often lost. Why? * Things get partisan: sales wants X, marketing wants Y, finance wants Z. * Discussions turn blame-oriented. Instead of working to solve problems,
VC
Visualization tools startup Palantir announced a follow-on financing round yesterday, raising $90M at a claimed $735M valuation. Since most people aren't familiar with either finance or VC math, this can generate confusion so I thought I'd do a post explaining a few things. The first
We are in the middle of one of our periodic analyst tours at MarkLogic, where we meet about 50 top software industry analysts focused in areas like enterprise search, enterprise content management, and database management systems. The NoSQL movement was one of four key topics we are covering, and while
Entrepreneurship
One of the things that irritates me about Silicon Valley culture is its blatant ageism. I dislike it for several reasons: * Let's start with the easy one: it's illegal. As an employer you should be looking for someone qualified to do the job, not someone of
Marketing
Dear Marketer: I get about 5 of these emails a day. Dear Dave, Hope you are doing great. Damco has vast experience in providing high quality and cost effective data processing services to its clients globally. Since its inception in 1996, Damco has honed its level of expertise and built
Databases
We generally refer to MarkLogic Server as an XML server, which is a special-purpose database management system (DBMS) for unstructured information. This often sparks debate about the term "unstructured" and the information continuum in general. Surprisingly, while both analysts and vendors frequently discuss the concept, the Wikipedia
BI
I spent an hour or so browsing the QlikTech S-1 and thought I’d share some observations. (See here for my prior post on the company.) * The company has achieved good scale (2009 revenues of $157M) but growth has been decelerating from 82% in 2007 to 47% in 2008
Open Source
The other day I noticed a taxonomy used on one of the NoSQL Database blogs that went like this: Types of NoSQL systems * Core NoSQL Systems * Wide column stores * Document stores * Key-value / tuple stores * Eventually consistent key-value stores * Graph databases * Soft NoSQL Systems (not the original intention ...) * Object
Strategy
As I sit here at Palantir's Govcon 5 conference at the lavish Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner (Virgina), I can't help but think about the recent "fit or fat" startup debate that hit the blogosphere a few weeks back. The debate started
Thanks to two major trends -- DBMS specialization and the NoSQL movement -- the database management systems space is generating more interest and more innovation than any time I can remember since the 1980s. Ever since around 1990, when the relational database management system (RDBMS) became firmly established, IT has played DBMSroulette:
Marketing
I've spent my career competing, for the most part successfully, against companies from 10 to 1,000 times bigger than my own. Thus, over the years, I've developed some rules that can help maximize your odds of success when competing against giants. * Concentrate force. The easiest
