Big data analytics is one of the hottest and fastest growing areas in the IT industry, and open-source is a trend that is becoming especially popular in this space. EMC COO and president Pat Gelsinger spoke at EMC World 2011, and provided a glimpse on how companies leverage big data analytics to gain business.

Gelsinger highlighted T-mobile as an example, which has used Greenplum to analyze 1.5 petabytes of data worth of mobile data to find out why customers choose to leave the service provider.

“It took Greenplum and combined multiple datasets together – cell tower data for quality, click stream, social data, call record data – and brought it together in over a petabyte.  Within a few days of bringing it together, that allowed them to point to when, the reason and the network impact of losing customers or customer churn.”

Gelsinger also presented a demo during his keynote. It demonstrated that a Greenplum system could be used to cross-reference more than 16 billion order items with 56 million customers for analytical purposes, and return a result within 33 seconds.

Alongside the keynote, big data analytics today reached yet another milestone. Alpine Data Labs, the first developer of a forward-looking big data analytics product, announced it has secured $7.5 million in a first round of funding. Sierra Ventures, Mission Ventures and the Sumitomo Corporation participated in the round.

The funding will be used to grow Alpine’s staff and expand the company’s entry to the U.S market, but the really interesting part is that Alpine was founded by 3 major Greenplum contributors. CEO Anderson Wong was a general manager with the company, CTO and co-founder Yi-Ling Chen served as technical director of support and service for Greenplum in China. Greenpulm co-founder Scott Yara, and is a part of Apline’s board of directors and advisors.

Greenplum had quite a bit of updates in the past 48 hours – EMC has launched the Greenplum HD Appliance yesterday at EMC World 2011, where Hadoop had a few launches of its own.