EMC Buys Linux Grid Middleware from Acxiom

Published: January 10, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For the past several years, storage vendor EMC has been diversifying its business through acquisitions, buying up server virtualization software maker VMware and content management software maker Documentum, just to name two biggies. And now EMC is turning its eyes to grid and utility computing. Last week, EMC paid $30 million to buy up the intellectual property behind homegrown grid middleware software that was created for Linux by Acxiom to support a set of hosted applications.

According to Ian Baird, chief technology officer of grid and utility computing at EMC, who was hired away from Platform Computing more than a year ago to help EMC build up a grid software business, Acxiom's software is the most tightly integrated grid software stack that he has run across, which is why EMC bought it. It is also, as it turns out, one of the oldest grid implementations in the market.

More than four years ago, Acxiom, which provides customer data integration services and data mart construction services to some of the biggest companies in the world, decided that it wanted to move from a hosted environment for its software to that dedicated one set of applications for one customer on one set of servers to a shared grid infrastructure for its hosted customers. But the Globus Toolkit was just a toy then, and no one had yet created and integrated the portal, workflow, workload managers, security, and backend systems that constitute a true utility solution. So over the past four years, Acxiom has spent some $100 million and dedicated some 120 programmers to create the software to do this. And while Baird says that the Acxiom middleware is not necessarily best-of-breed for any one component, he says that it is the most integrated grid solution for commercial applications that he has seen yet, which is why EMC snapped it up. He also won't say what this Acxiom grid middleware is based on, except that it includes Java, Perl, and C++ code and uses Apache, MySQL, JBoss, and other open source technologies. The software only runs on X86/X64 machines and only on Linux. It is built extremely modularly, Baird says, which means EMC can swap out components for security, workflow, or workload management as it sees fit.

Having acquired the intellectual property behind the Acxiom grid middleware, EMC will now spend the next two years making it more robust, porting it to other platforms (probably Unix and Windows, but EMC will not yet say specifically), and weaving in its own technologies (such as content management and virtualization, among others). While two years seems like a long time, EMC says that Acxiom was not a software company and while it created a sophisticated grid middleware suite and the tools to manage it, EMC has a much more conservative software development process and has ambitious goals for how it can be improved and, more importantly, made generic enough that it can support not just Acxiom's business intelligence applications, but any number of life sciences, financial services, and other gridable applications. EMC and Acxiom will partner to do the development, which means those 120 employees seem to have a pretty good job security for the next two years. Baird won't say why EMC won't just hire the Axciom team, but it could be that Acxiom doesn't want to let go of such valuable employees.

In the meantime, Acxiom has some 80 of its biggest clients using the hosted service, and there are no plans to change that. In fact, now Acxiom and EMC will work together to sell the hosted service Acxiom has created and, when the commercialized version of the software is ready two years from now, both will sell that offering to other clients to allow them to set up their own grids to run the Acxiom software or other gridable applications. EMC will not set up its own utilities to run any gridded applications, but will rather help others use the grid middleware it creates to set up their own utilities. This is the same approach that Sun Microsystems has taken with its Sun Grid compute and storage utility. Sun is building a proof-of-concept prototype that developers can use for free, but is not going to get into the utility business itself above and beyond keeping its wires warm with some relatively modest deals.