Storage vendor EMC has a very rounded-out strategy that combines a lot of acquisitions, which represent perhaps the bulk of the company’s investments, and in house development. Joe Tucci confirmed this during a keynote last month where he provided some official numbers about EMC’s spenditure: $10.4 billion went to R&D between 2003 and 2012, while $14 billion were spent on acquisitions throughout the same period. Out of the $5 billion EMC spends on technology every year, more than 10 percent of its revenue goes to in-house development. M&A also represents a fairly significant chunk of that.

“As the big guys jockey for position, they’ve gobbled up all sorts of smaller players…Not to be left behind, EMC paid an estimated $350 million for data warehousing vendor Greenplum, and $2.2 billion for big data storage cluster maker Isilon,” reports Wired.

The big data explosion, a still relatively fresh term, is one of the key drivers behind the growth the company has seen and its purchase of smaller players. Company officials at EMC are continuously investing in strengthening the position of Greenplum and the other subsidiaries it maintains across various industries, which is no big surprise.  The company’s sales increased threefold since 2002, and IDC thinks the amount of data in the ‘digital universe’ will multiply by 44 by 2020 – meaning a lot of companies will be spending sizable amounts on upgrading their storage systems.

While EMC is working on fleshing out the products of the companies it has acquired, its organically-developed solutions are also getting attention.  It recently updated the Atmos Cloud Delivery Platform, adding Linux support and expanded functionality in the form of additional monitoring tools. Klint Finley wrote up an overall analysis of the impact of Atmos Cloud v1.1 and some of the other industry updates around the private and public here.