Last week three of the biggest companies in technology were busy positioning themselves for the future. Collectively, their actions tell you a lot about the kind of turmoil headed for the rest of the business world.

EMC announced Tuesday that it has acquired application development consultancy, Pivotal Labs, which will help Greenplum customers more quickly develop software for big data business analytics through the use of methodologies and programming frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.

Pivotal Labs finally made the news official yesterday: the pioneering agile development consultancy known for its influence on startups like Twitter and Square would be acquired by EMC Corporation, a publicly-traded corporation with a market cap of $59 billion that manufactures and sells cloud and storage hardware and helps IT departments move to the cloud.

Pivotal Labs will keep on doing what it does best after EMC’s acquisition, according to Pivotal CEO Rob Mee. There has been concern over Pivotal’s future as part of the EMC behemoth, which Rob Mee did his best to alleviate at Structure: Data 2012.

“The transformative power of what we, together, could achieve for customers became quickly and abundantly clear,” said Bill Cook, head of EMC’s Greenplum division. “We’re incredibly energized about the opportunity to grow this business even further, and to help customers accelerate their quest for new levels of agility and increasingly meaningful data-driven insights.”