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Number-cruncher Netezza enters bioinformatics
area |
| 09/22/2003 08:11 AM |
| By Jeff
Miller |
Netezza Corp. in Framingham has
added a third market to the list of verticals into which it aims to
sell its high-end data warehousing and analysis appliance: the
bioinformatics space.
The company has extended functionality
on its products for the life sciences market, and it’s got a bead on
at least one potential life sciences customer.
The J. Craig
Venter Science Foundation, a Maryland-based nonprofit research
center, is beta-testing Netezza’s equipment for use in data
analysis. The Institute for Genomic Research, one of the research
groups supported by Venter, sequenced the first complete genome of a
free-living organism in 1995.
“I’d say that telecom is now
our primary focus,” said Ellen Rubin, director of marketing for
Netezza. “We see the bioinformatics opportunity as second to
that.”
Is bioinformatics a bigger opportunity than the
financial services industry?
“Possibly,” Rubin said. “We feel
we have a lot of momentum and it’s a pretty open
market.”
Netezza has developed an integrated,
standards-compliant appliance that uses commodity components,
commodity processors, Linux and an open source database to process
gargantuan amounts of data each second.
Essentially, it’s a
God box for data processing and data warehousing.
In
telecommunications, for example, customers use Netezza’s equipment
to assist with revenue assurance issues for billions of calls.
Financial services companies crunch market
data.
Bioinformatics was a much heralded opportunity for IT
startups in the late 1990s, with the race to sequence the human
genome. Engineers and venture capitalists raced to provide big
pharma with the tools they thought scientists needed to better
analyze the mountains of genetic data their labs were
generating.
But it was a bust. Pharmaceutical companies, it
turned out, would rather develop their own applications.
“A
lot of the hype was around prepackaged applications for scientists,
but most of these companies are looking for tools that allow them to
build applications themselves,” said Dan Vesset, an analyst with
IDC. “Methodologies change, so it’s not like accounting where a
company can package a standard solution.”
Netezza, however,
is taking a different angle. Rather than provide applications, it’s
providing the internal infrastructure that will allow those in-
ternally generated applications to run much faster.
But it’s
not as if Netezza is alone. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle Corp., Dell
and many others have their sights on selling high-end databases and
high-end computing systems to life sciences
organizations.
Netezza, however, believes it can provide
better price performance than its competitors, and the entire system
is all contained in one product.
“IBM will be taking the
mantle of very high-end supercomputing, Dell will be low end, low
cost, and HP will take the midrange,” said Bill Blake, senior vice
president of product development for Netezza. “We’re toward the high
end, but it’s a commodity-based system that can match the
performance of the high-end supercomputers.” |
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