EMC Tuesday confirmed a report that it had bought 22-year-old privately held web development house Pivotal Labs for its agile development methodology and its widely used Pivotal Tracker tool.

How much EMC spent buying the San Francisco-based software consulting operation wasn't disclosed. It did say it paid cash.

EMC imagines tuning datasets in its newly available Greenplum Chorus, which adds a Facebook-like social collaboration tool to Big Data for the data science team, and rapidly building out insightful Big Data applications using modern programming environments such as Ruby on Rails complements of Pivotal. Pivotal worked on Chorus' development with EMC last year.

EMC, which points put that packaged Big Data applications are scarce, wants to be seen as the platform for next-generation applications and solutions in Big Data easing corporations' internal development process. After all it needs to fill its storage with Big Data, but it's expensive.

Pivotal specializes in Rails, Java or Mobile application co-development for the consumer web, mobiles and the enterprise automation. It's home to more than 150 engineers. Pivotal Labs counts Twitter, Salesforce.com, Groupon, EMI and Best Buy as customers.

EMC will target start-ups and enterprises with cloud, Big Data, social and mobile next-generation applications in mind.

It said it will invest in the company to get it to global scale.

The Pivotal Tracker project management tool is currently used by over 240,000 developers.

EMC paired the news of Pivotal's acquisition with word that it's open sourcing Greenplum Chorus.

Chorus source code will be released under an open source license as part of the new OpenChorus Initiative, designed to increase development speeds and the adoption of social data applications running on Chorus. Figure this happens in the second half.