Netezza's hardware-accelerated warehouse gains ground

Analyst William Fellows
Sector Storage & Systems
Report type Market Development
Date Tue, 21 Oct 2003


Event summary

  • Netezza's first vertical market package is aimed at the bio-informatics sector, offering a way to create a single copy of sequence data and associated structure data in a SQL database. It won't be its last.

  • Netezza claims four customers in production and two (paying) proof-of-concept customers, plus six additional companies in the pipeline for October. It hopes to have a customer base of 10 by February.

  • Using hardware acceleration to drive BI/data warehousing has already been validated by market leader Teradata, and this sector remains a hot spot in enterprise IT.


The 451 take

Netezza's first vertical market package is designed for the life sciences market, offering a way to create a single copy of sequence data and associated structure data in a SQL database. We expect its genomic market play to be followed with additional vertical market packages - telecom, finance and retail, where the company already has some traction, are the obvious choices. With BI gaining momentum, Netezza's commodity-based hardware acceleration techniques and data warehouse are attracting attention. The technique is validated by market leader Teradata. The company claims users can replace existing equipment worth as much as $10m by spending $1m on Netezza. It has raised $53m to date, including $20m last quarter.


    Event details

    Netezza has announced two new configurations of the Netezza Performance Server appliance that double its speed and triple its capacity, targeting generic, high-performance warehousing. It also revealed a bio-aware database and warehouse configuration for genomic medicine that is being beta-tested by the J Craig Venter Science Foundation. The company's hardware-accelerated data warehouse appears to be gaining momentum. Specifically, a new vertically oriented NPS system has been integrated with SQL-BLAST, which handles data types specific to bio-informatics applications. It integrates sequence analysis using BLAST with a SQL relational database. Users can create a single copy of sequence data and associated structure data in a SQL database, enabling processing in near time at the source of the data, with full sets rather than samples. The new NPS 8450 and 8650 configurations are designed for BI on large or consolidated data marts, and increase the available user data storage to 18TB and 27TB respectively. Netezza also released v2.0.1 of its software. Former Sun president Ed Zander now sits on its board.


    Competitive landscape

    Netezza's competition is Teradata, IBM (DB2) and Sun/Oracle (8i). Red Brick and Informix users face end-of-life product decisions, so Netezza hopes it can pick up business here. Clareos looks set to compete, but has so far made no showing. With six additional companies in the pipeline for October, Netezza hopes to have a customer base of 10 by February. Epsilon offers outsourced analytics on Netezza, while Vibrant offers the system to telcos. It has no services play and therefore no channel conflict, it says. It counts Business Objects, Microsoft, SPSS, Ascential, Informatica, SAS and others as partners, and Infogain, Knightsbridge and Exigent as services partners. Netezza has a multimillion dollar deal with Orange in the UK for a CRM application, claiming to have beaten out Teradata and IBM. The opportunity is to expand its footprint within the Orange group.


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