Bracknell, Berkshire, 31 October 2005—Netezza Corporation today announced that The Carphone Warehouse – Europe’s leading mobile communications retailer – has selected the enterprise-class Netezza Performance Server® (NPS®) data warehouse appliance as its customer data and core records platform. The move was sparked by the company’s desire to perform increasingly sophisticated analysis of customer information as well as to handle the sheer volume of data being generated as a consequence of its rapid growth. The NPS system was selected to work across 10 European territories by The Carphone Warehouse over IBM, Oracle and Teradata for its price / performance ratio, as well as its speed of deployment.

Dave Parfett, Head of Relational Technologies CoE at The Carphone Warehouse explained, “Our Oracle-based data warehouse is about four years old, and was mainly designed as a financial analysis tool. Over the last three years we have experienced rapid company change and growth, and we needed a system capable of keeping pace with us. The expansion of our land line business, Talk Talk, coupled with numerous business acquisitions and our new financial product line started to put pressure on the data warehouse in terms of storage capacity and processing time.”

According to the Company, its business users required more comprehensive, detailed analyses from the data warehouse, so as part of an IT infrastructure evaluation and investment process, it considered four options – stay with an Oracle database, or move to IBM, Netezza or Teradata. Parfett continued, “The NPS system offers good value for the money. The price/performance ratio was a good fit for us, and we were impressed by the potential speed of deployment – two weeks from point of order in our case. The general manageability was also attractive to us. Until now, tasks such as adding a process for example, were extremely resource-intensive. This resulted in undesirable risk, time wastage and expense. We needed a better, cheaper way to manage the warehouse, so we chose Netezza,” concluded Parfett.

The Carphone Warehouse understands the significant value that fast, comprehensive data analysis brings to organisations dealing with large volumes of data. Replacing its existing system with the NPS data warehouse appliance will support the company’s leading-edge status as the second largest fixed line telecommunications company in the UK, and as the leading independent mobile communications retailer in Europe. The NPS system will enable The Carphone Warehouse to run a wide variety of interactive analyses, while dramatically reducing query times. For example, it can now fully leverage the detailed data it collects from retail ‘buy and connect’ transactions and insurance sales data, as well as core records. These include Talk Talk customer files and revenue assurance records. The Carphone Warehouse is responsible for the after-sales care of over one million subscription customers on behalf of a selection of networks across Europe, including Vodafone and O2 in the UK.

According to The Carphone Warehouse, post-purchase care generates recurring revenue from customers following the point of sale, through extensive customer management including billing, credit control, ongoing specialist and impartial advice and exemplary services. This strategy will be more readily met with the NPS system in support.

Dave Kloc, General Manager for Netezza, Northern Europe added, “Telecommunications organisations are experiencing a true explosion of constantly growing and evolving data. The success of these companies will strongly rely on how quickly and easily they can harness these massive amounts of data to make intelligent business decisions. We have a solid presence in this sector with clients such as Orange (UK) and Caudwell Communications. We’re delighted that The Carphone Warehouse has chosen the fast, comprehensive analytic capabilities of the NPS system to help their organisation profit from the valuable information held within its huge data volumes.”

The Netezza Performance Server system is the market-leading data warehouse appliance built specifically to analyse terabytes of detailed data – 10 to 50 times faster than existing data warehouses, at half the cost. The NPS system stores, filters and processes terabytes of records within a single unit, analysing only the relevant information for each query. Netezza has placed the CPU power next to the data, allowing the NPS system to speed through processes that would occupy most data warehouse systems for hours, or even days, thereby enabling dramatic increases in productivity across the organisation. Customers who have recognised the performance benefits of Netezza’s approach include Amazon.com, Caudwell Communications, CNET Networks, Orange UK, Premier, Inc., Shoppers Drug Mart Corporation and The TJX Companies.

About The Carphone Warehouse
The Carphone Warehouse Group PLC was set up in 1989 by Charles Dunstone with £6,000. Today it is Europe’s leading independent mobile communications retailer, generating annual turnover of £1,841.5m (y/e March 03), offering customers impartial and expert advice, the widest choice of the latest product and unbeatable service. The company operates across 10 markets and employs over 8,000 people working across the stores, the support centres, the call centres, the online teams and the direct sales teams (telesales). UK market share is over 22%.

About Netezza Corporation
Netezza is the market-leading provider of enterprise-class data warehouse appliances that deliver breakthrough performance and ease-of-use at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehouses. The Netezza Performance Server system enables Fortune 1000 customers with terabytes of dynamic, detailed data to dramatically simplify even the most complex Business Intelligence (BI) initiatives. By architecturally integrating database, server and storage within a single appliance, the NPS system delivers 10 to 50 times the performance at half the cost of existing systems. Founded in 2000 and based in Framingham, Mass., Netezza has offices in Washington, DC, the United Kingdom and Asia Pacific. The Company has raised more than $68M from leading venture capital firms, including Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures, Battery Ventures, Orange Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Meritech Capital Partners. For more information about Netezza, please visit www.netezza.com.

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