EMC Corporation has announced it has acquired San Francisco-based Pivotal Labs, a privately-held provider of agile software development services and tools. The all-cash transaction is not expected to have a material impact to EMC GAAP or non-GAAP EPS for the full 2012 fiscal year.

Pivotal Labs enhances EMC’s powerful portfolio of products and services, which are designed to enable organisations to store, analyse and take action on ‘Big Data’ – datasets so large they break traditional IT infrastructures. Earlier this year EMC introduced the Greenplum Unified Analytics Platform (UAP) that delivered, for the first time, a scale-out infrastructure for analysing both structured and unstructured data. EMC also announced general availability of Greenplum Chorus – another industry first, delivering a Facebook-like social collaboration tool for Data Science teams to iterate on the development of datasets and ensure that useful insights are delivered to the business quickly. EMC brought Data Science and its chief practitioner – the Data Scientist – to the fore a year ago at the world’s first Data Scientist Summit. With the addition of Pivotal Labs, EMC can now take datasets perfected in Greenplum Chorus and enable customers to rapidly build out Big Data applications using modern programming environments such as Ruby on Rails.

Big Data is new – so new in fact that packaged Big Data applications are scarce. Most organisations dump large volumes of data into stores like Hadoop and write custom code to extract value. However, now with Pivotal Labs, the leader in agile development practices that embrace rapid iteration, test driven development, open source tools and modern frameworks, both start-ups and global enterprise customers will have the ability to quickly build new applications and services that capitalise on Big Data.

Founded in 1989, Pivotal Labs brings to EMC a highly differentiated and best-in-class software development methodology; world-class engineering talent in web, mobile, Big Data and cloud services; and an industry-leading software development tool, Pivotal Tracker, with more than 240,000 developer customers worldwide. Pivotal’s customers include Twitter, Best Buy, Groupon, Salesforce.com, EMI, Urban Dictionary, Linden Lab, Task Rabbit, The Annie E. Casey Foundation and many others. In keeping with prior successful acquisitions, EMC will invest in and organise Pivotal Labs so it can scale its business through demand driven from EMC.