San Mateo, California, June 8, 2009 -- Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for the next generation of data warehousing and analytics, today unveiled its Enterprise Data Cloud™ (EDC) initiative. The EDC Initiative is a bold new vision for bringing the power of self-service to data warehousing and analytics, encompassing three primary areas:

• Platform: The EDC platform, based on self-service provisioning, elastic scale and massively parallel processing

• Methodology: an agile approach to data analytics that embraces large-scale data collection, getting data into the hands of business users, and iterating quickly

• Ecosystem: customers and partners that embrace these new capabilities with tools, infrastructure and creative methodologies.

The EDC initiative is a response to the costly and inflexible solutions that have dominated the market for the past 30 years, including enterprise data warehouse (EDW) mainframes and data warehouse appliances, and traditional methodologies and monolithic approaches to implementing data warehousing and analytic systems. By contrast, the disruptive capabilities of the EDC platform are making possible much more agile approaches to implementing analytic infrastructures that allow companies to unify their data and empower business units and analysts to see data in new ways and achieve insights faster than ever before.

The Enterprise Data Cloud platform is a software-based platform that enables enterprises to create and manage any number of data warehouses and data marts that can be deployed across a common pool of physical, virtual, or public cloud infrastructure. Key building blocks of the EDC platform include:

• Self-service provisioning: providing analysts and DBAs the ability to provision new data warehouses and data marts in minutes with a single click.

• Massive scale and elastic expansion: ability to load, store, and manage data at petabyte scale, and dynamically expand the size of the system without system downtime.

• Highly optimized parallel database core: the system has as its foundation a parallel database that is optimized for BI and analytics and is linearly scalable.

“Cloud-based virtualization is beginning to seep into analytic infrastructures,” wrote James Kobielus, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research in his June 2009 report titled Massive But Agile: Best Practices For Scaling The Next-Generation Enterprise Data Warehouse. “To support flexible mixed-workload analytics, the EDW, over the coming 5-10 years, will evolve into a virtualized, cloud-based, and supremely scalable distributed platform.”

Greenplum also announced today general availability of Greenplum Database 3.3, which introduces key EDC features such as online warehouse expansion. Greenplum Database is architected from the ground up as a software-only, agile solution and already supports many of the key building blocks of the Enterprise Data Cloud platform. Greenplum Database’s EDC capabilities will be further refined in a series of product releases over the coming twelve months that will enhance automation, provisioning and management of Enterprise Data Cloud platforms.

“For the past few years, the focus in the data warehousing market has been on bigger and faster, or smaller and cheaper - but what's been neglected is the end user, the data practitioners who require access to all of the data within an enterprise, but also need to be able to manage and analyze that data as needed to achieve business insights. A cloud fabric with self-service provisioning empowers end users to simply point-and-click to instantly generate their own data mart or analytical sandbox. The cloud approach, with self-service provisioning at its core, is the future of data warehousing," said Scott Yara, president and co-founder, Greenplum. “We plan to evolve our technology aggressively to make the process of building an EDC even faster and easier, and we look forward to working with our customers and partners to develop new methodologies that fully exploit the power of the EDC approach."

Large Enterprises Embrace the Enterprise Data Cloud Vision

As part of the EDC initiative, Greenplum is assembling an ecosystem of customers and partners who embrace this new approach and are collaborating with Greenplum to create new technologies and standards that leverage the capabilities of the EDC platform. Early participants who are deploying Enterprise Data Cloud platforms on Greenplum Database include Fox Interactive Media/MySpace, Zions Bancorporation and Future Group.

“Through bank acquisitions and because of increasingly stringent analytic needs, dramatically increasing user needs and ongoing regulatory compliance changes, our data volumes and user base are growing exponentially. We turned to Greenplum because its massively parallel data warehousing approach was purpose-built for large-scale data analysis and is the only one robust and cost effective to grow with us over time,” said H. Walter Young, senior vice president of Corporate Finance at Zions Bancorporation.

“Flexibility and agility are core requirements in our IT infrastructure,“ said Ushir Bhatt, CEO of Future Knowledge Services within Future Group. “Greenplum Database is a centerpiece of our strategy to use a cloud-like approach to our data warehouse. Greenplum’s leadership in bringing forth Enterprise Data Cloud is another example of how they are leap-frogging their competition in the data warehousing market and adapting to the business needs of retailers.”

Leading Technology Vendors Partner to Create the Enterprise Data Cloud

Enterprise Data Cloud platforms combine technology from Greenplum and numerous partners in the IT ecosystem. From hardware to business intelligence software, Greenplum’s partners are a part of a customer’s EDC deployment.

“With growing amounts of information becoming the most important asset to a business there is a need to have data warehouse and analytics solutions that are highly available, cost and energy efficient and easy-to-use,” said EMC’s Chuck Hollis, EMC Vice President, Global Marketing Chief Technology Officer. “Greenplum’s Enterprise Data Cloud initiative is an innovative approach to leveraging the capabilities of cloud computing in the datacenter to drive more IT efficiency.”

“MicroStrategy’s business intelligence software helps organizations transform volumes of operational data into actionable information,” said Sanju Bansal, COO of MicroStrategy. “As data volumes increase exponentially, customers will have an even greater need for rapid access to information and enhanced visualization capabilities from cloud-based Business Intelligence solutions.”

“The combination of Greenplum Database with Informatica's industry-leading Data Integration platform allows joint customers to gain operational efficiencies in all steps of the data integration lifecycle – including data extraction, loading and transformation processes,” said Harry Gould, senior vice president, Worldwide Alliances, Informatica. “Greenplum is distinctive in the database market because they provide a solution that can solve large-scale analytics challenges today and have a roadmap for cloud-based solutions of the future.”

“Customers are looking to innovative companies such as Greenplum to deliver technology that is at the foundation of their long-term computing requirements,” said Tim Rathbun, executive vice president, GoldenGate Software. “The partnership between GoldenGate and Greenplum provides that real-time data can be integrated into Enterprise Data Cloud platforms.”

“Greenplum is building a powerful architecture for scalable data warehousing leveraging cloud technologies,” said Mansour Karam, Director of Business Development at Arista Networks. “Processing terabytes and petabytes of data requires immense I/O and network bandwidth and Arista’s 10GigE switches provide the scalability and performance for even the largest systems.”

About Greenplum

Greenplum is the pioneer of Enterprise Data Cloud™ solutions that bring the power of self-service to large-scale data warehousing and analytics, providing customers with flexible access to all their data for business intelligence and analytics. Greenplum offers industry-leading performance at a low cost for companies managing terabytes to petabytes of data. Data-driven businesses around the world, including NASDAQ OMX, NYSE Euronext, Reliance Communications, Skype and Fox Interactive Media/MySpace, have adopted the Greenplum Database to support their mission-critical business functions. For more information visit www.greenplum.com.