Netezza

Netezza

Company type	Subsidiary of IBM
Industry	Data Warehousing
Founded	2000
Headquarters	Marlborough, Massachusetts, United States
Key people	Jitendra Saxena, Founder Foster Hinshaw, Co-founder and former CTO Jim Baum, President and CEO Sudip, Chairman of the Board Patrick J. Scannell, Senior Vice President, CFO and Treasurer Ray Tacoma, SVP Worldwide Sales Tricia Cotter, SVP of Operations David Flaxman, SVP of Products and Technology Prat Moghe, SVP Strategy and New Markets
Products	Data Warehouse Appliance Integrated Data Warehouse Hardware and Software Professional Services Customer Services
Revenue	US$190.6 million (FY 2010)
Number of employees	469 (2010)
Website	www.netezza.com

Netezza (pronounced Ne-Tease-Ah) (NYSE: NZ) designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.

Netezza is widely credited for either inventing or bringing renewed attention to the data warehouse appliance category, depending upon whether one regards long-time data warehouse technology vendor Teradata as having been in the data warehouse appliance category all along.

Founded in 2000, the company is based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, with 19 offices in more than 12 countries, including the UK, Japan, China and Germany. As of August 2010, Netezza had a workforce of 469 employees. The company opened a new development lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts in August 2010.

On September 20, 2010, IBM and Netezza announced a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Netezza for $27 per share.

Introduction

Data warehouse appliances architecturally integrate database, server and storage components into a single unit. Netezza's appliances use a proprietary Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing (AMPP) architecture that combines open, blade-based servers and disk storage with a proprietary data filtering process using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

FPGAs are increasingly used in conventional high performance computing applications where specific computational kernels are performed on the FPGA instead of a microprocessor. Netezza’s FPGA implementation performs complex data filtering so that only relevant portions of big data sets are passed along to the processor to run the SQL query. Additionally, spare FPGA cycles are used to perform data compression and decompression, reducing the load on the processor. Because the FPGA handles the compression, and the data set is smaller, data throughput is significantly boosted. In-database processing reduces latency and accelerates data analysis by eliminating the need to move data out of, and results back into, the warehouse..

This has resulted in a resurgence of customer desire to migrate their bulk data processing back into the machine (e.g. ELT), obviating the need for large-scale rollouts of companion ETL tool environments. This industry sentiment has taken the ETL tool vendors by surprise, as none of them are ready for the logistical scaling necessary to keep a Netezza machine burning at full capacity. ETL tools typically provide "a means" to push queries to the Netezza machine, but common in-the-box processing approaches regularly submit hundreds of queries, many of them asynchronously, in mere minutes to the Netezza machine. This closes off their processing windows in a fraction of the time of the ETL tools.

History

Netezza was incorporated in Delaware on August 18, 2000 as Intelligent Data Engines, Inc. and changed its name to Netezza Corporation in November 2000. In July 2007, Netezza Corporation had its initial public offering under the ticker “NZ” on NYSE Arca.

Jim Baum was appointed CEO of Netezza in January, 2008 after founder Jit Saxena announced his retirement. Baum started at Netezza as COO in 2006. Prior to joining Netezza, Baum was president and CEO of Endeca in Boston for five years. Before Endeca, Baum was executive vice president and general manager during his 11-year tenure at Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) in Needham, Massachusetts.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ) on September 20, 2010 announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Netezza, a publicly held company based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, in a cash transaction at a price of $27 per share or at a net price of approximately $1.7 billion, after adjusting for cash. Netezza will expand IBM's business analytics initiatives to help clients gain faster insights into their business information.

Markets

As of September 2010, the primary vertical markets into which Netezza sells are digital media, energy and utilities, retailing, telecommunications, financial services, health care, and government. Most of Netezza's business continues to be in the United States, and much of the rest in the United Kingdom, but the company makes sales in a growing number of additional countries: 75% of the company's product revenue was from U.S.-based customers, while 25% was from international customers for the three months ended July 31, 2010, as compared to 88% of its product revenue from customers in the United States and 12% from international customers for the three months ended July 31, 2009. Netezza is reported to have made recent inroads into Japan and Europe.

As of September 2010, the company reported 373 customers worldwide for its primary product, up from 191 in July 2008.

Products

TwinFin, Netezza’s primary product, is designed for rapid analysis of data volumes scaling into petabytes. The company introduced the 4th generation of the TwinFin product in August 2009. Netezza introduced a scaled-down version of this appliance under the Skimmer brand in January 2010.

In February 2010, Netezza announced that it had opened up its systems to support major programming models, including Hadoop, MapReduce, Java, C++, and Python models. Netezza's partners predicted to leverage this analytic application support are Tibco Spotfire, MicroStrategy, Pursway, DemandTec and QuantiSense.

The company also markets specialized appliances for retail, spatial, complex analytics and regulatory compliance needs. Netezza additionally sells software-based products for migrating from Oracle Exadata and for implementing data virtualization and federation (data abstraction) schemes.

Technology

Netezza’s proprietary AMPP architecture is a two-tiered system designed to quickly handle very large queries from multiple users.

The first tier is a high-performance Linux SMP host that compiles data query tasks received from business intelligence applications, and generates query execution plans. It then divides a query into a sequence of sub-tasks, or snippets that can be executed in parallel, and distributes the snippets to the second tier for execution.

The second tier consists of one to hundreds of snippet processing blades, or S-Blades, where all the primary processing work of the appliance is executed. The S-Blades are intelligent processing nodes that make up the massively parallel processing (MPP) engine of the appliance. Each S-Blade is an independent server that contains multi-core Intel-based CPUs and Netezza’s proprietary multi-engine, high-throughput FPGAs. The S-Blade is composed of a standard blade-server combined with a special Netezza Database Accelerator card which snaps alongside the blade. Each S-Blade is, in turn, connected to multiple disk drives processing multiple data streams in parallel in TwinFin or Skimmer.

AMPP employs industry-standard interfaces (SQL, ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB) and provides load times in excess of 2 TB/hour and backup/restore data rates of more than 4 TB/hour.

In 2009, the company transitioned from PowerPC processors to Intel CPUs. In August, 2009, with the introduction of the 4th generation TwinFin product, Netezza moved from proprietary blades to IBM blades.

Customers

As of September 2010, the company's customer base includes Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Capital Blue Cross of Harrisburg Pennsylvania, Con-way Freight, DataLogix, Epsilon, interCLICK, IntercontinentalExchange, Japan Medical Data Center, Kelley Blue Book, Marshfield Clinic, MediaMath, MetroPCS, MicroAd, MyLife.com, NYSE Euronext, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Safeway and The Nielsen Company.

In April 2010 the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) purchased a data warehouse and analytics appliance from Netezza as part of a $178m smart-grid project being funded by the US Department of Energy.

Netezza customers regularly speak of processing tens of billions of rows, even hundreds of billions of rows, and hundreds of terabytes, as casually as the weather. The ease with which the Netezza architecture scales is a tribute to its architects and engineers. Their attention to "simplification" is thematic in the product. Where every other database requires the owner to know deep details about the technology, Netezza users claim that all they really need to know are (a) Structured Query Language and (b) Their own data. Netezza has mastered all of the rest inside the machine. In this regard, it is one of the few appliance machines that is truly an appliance with very little maintenance and administration.

Netezza also holds an annual user conference called Enzee Universe which hosts technology tracks, case studies, trainings, and speakers such as Stephen L. Baker.

Since 2009, the Enzee Universe has focused on its user base with Best Practice Sessions led by David Birmingham. Recognized by Netezza in 2010 as the "Voice of the Enzee Universe" through regular interaction with "Enzees" in social media, Mr. Birmingham has written the only two books on the Netezza appliance. Netezza Underground (2008) and Netezza Transformation (2011), and now author of the popular Netezza Underground Blog on the IBM DeveloperWorks site. Over 500 Enzees attended the 2011 Boston Best Practice Sessions, a 6-hour, information-packed series of presentations featuring a constellation of recognized Netezza power-hitters such as Mark Aukeman and David Overcash. Now an IBM Champion, Mr. Birmingham is internationally recognized as the leading expert in the Netezza technology and its various applications.

Competition

Netezza’s main competitors include Oracle Exadata and Teradata, as well as Microsoft, Sybase IQ, Vertica, Aster Data Systems and Greenplum.

Recognition & Criticism

Netezza was added to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for DBMS in January, 2009.

Netezza was mentioned in "The Spy Files", released by the notorious website WikiLeaks. The file claims Netezza bought a copy of The Geospatial Toolkit, a location-based analytic software from The Intelligent Integration Systems, Inc., "allegedly reverse engineered the code and sold a hacked version to the Central Intelligence Agency for use in remotely piloted drone aircraft". It goes on to state, "IISI, which says that the software could be wrong by a distance of up to 40 feet, sued Netezza to prevent the use of this software. Company founder Rich Zimmerman stated in court that his 'reaction was one of stun, amazement that they (CIA) want to kill people with my software that doesn’t work.'"

External links

• Official Home Page
• Netezza TwinFin Pricing - Netezza TwinFin base pricing and information
• Howard, Philip. "Netezza surprises with technical capabilities".
• Enzee Universe - Netezza user conference
• Gather 'Round The Grill - Netezza Community (Birmingham Blog)
• Netezza Underground - Birmingham Blog
• Netezza Underground - Reference and How-To Book
• Netezza Transformation - Reference and How-To Book