Citing need among its customers and the broader market, Netezza announced on
Monday that its Netezza Performance Server, a data warehousing appliance for
BI (business intelligence) analytics, will soon be scalable to the petabyte
level.

Systems capable of that scale will be available beginning in the middle of
this year, according to the company. The increased performance will be made
possible in part through the company's recently
announced Compress Engine, for advanced compression, according to Netezza.
The new systems will also support multi-terabyte per hour data-loading, the
company said.

Netezza, based in Framingham, Massachusetts, has regularly announced performance
improvements since launching its appliance in 2002. That initial version could
handle up to six terabytes of data, according to the company. That leapfrogged
to 27 terabytes in 2004 and 100 terabytes in 2005, Netezza said.

"We have a number of customers who are now at or approaching that upper
range," said Phil Francisco, the company's director of product marketing.

Francisco said the new systems will preserve the company's existing pricing
model. Low-end systems start below US$200,000 and scale up from there, with
support coming at additional cost, he said.

Richard Winter, a consultant with Winter Corp. in Waltham, Massachusetts, said
the BI market is ripe for more powerful data-crunching products. "Every
time you turn around you see another industry that's facing a tidal wave of
data and they need to understand what this data is saying," he said. "Many
of them have data volumes in this range that they haven't been able to afford
to analyze, as much as they'd like to. ... [Netezza] can deliver that analytic
capability, and at a very attractive price."

James Kobielus, an analyst with Forrester Research, said Netezza is now aiming
for the highest end of the data warehousing market, going after the likes of
Teradata.

"Being able to scale up to a petabyte in context of an NPS deployment
will go a long way toward getting Netezza in that inner circle of vendors,"
he said.

The company may face certain problems of perception when attempting to poach
such vendors' customers, however. "Their chief challenge is the fact that
they're a startup," Kobielus said. "They're definitely not as old
and mature as the IBMs and Teradatas."

Netezza also may have limited appeal to customers that would prefer a one-stop
shopping approach for their BI-data warehousing needs. Instead, Netezza has
partnered with BI vendors such as Business Objects.

In addition, heightened competition may be around the corner for the firm,
according to the analysts.

"Over the course of the year you'll also see some appliance-type offerings
from the major players like Teradata and Oracle," Winter said. "They'll
compete down the road."

Kobielus said he sees Microsoft making a particularly strong push in coming
months.

"I am confident Microsoft will have some really important announcements
this year," he said. "Definitely look out for those guys."

IDG News Service

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