Regarding Oracle CEO Larry Ellison's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld 2009, I find his continued reference to Netezza as a baseline against the now-defunct HP version of Exadata a stark reminder of what Netezza has achieved in the past few years. In 2002, while Oracle was fighting other enemies, Netezza created an innovative appliance that combined specialized hardware architecture with very specific software to address the unprecedented growth in data and need to capture the insights from that data that enables businesses to be more competitive. The inherent simplicity in our approach makes it as easy for organizations to run hundreds of terabytes of data with a Netezza system as with an Oracle database comprising of only a few gigabytes.

Having solved this data-management problem and driven by the needs of our customers, Netezza’s attention is now focused on solving more complex analytical problems. It is interesting that Ellison had nothing to say on this topic and instead preferred to list off the hardware features of his newest SQL reporting machine. Clearly, he is no fool, but his attention is on transforming Oracle into a general-purpose IT vendor, akin to IBM.

In many industries, large systems companies are not always adept at solving revolutionary challenges. Fast, deep analytics are complex and it’s not as simple as acquiring companies and adding more products to a big company pricing sheet. Companies that 'compete on analytics' demand a specialized approach, not a generic systems platform.

Reality Check

Organizations want to do much more than simply “maintain control” of their growing amounts of data. The future is delivering previously impossible analytics on massive amounts of data to anyone who can benefit from it. Companies want to learn something from their digital assets without needing supercomputers and without great expense commitments to a single-system provider.

Once you get beyond reducing cost without penalties to performance and scale, the priorities of today's CIOs all trace back to a revolution around strategic, advanced analytics on massive amounts of data to not only better their business, but transform it. With a higher level of clarity, businesses want to better understand each individual customer, interaction or trend. Know what’s happening instantly. Adapt. Predict. That’s the future — and any vision of that analytics-based future was absent at Larry Ellison’s keynote as Oracle appears to be remaking itself in IBM’s image.

Analytics Foresight

Our vision is informed by the aspirations of our customers. These organizations are in consensus: Data captured in operating their businesses is a strategic asset. Instead of having to group their customers in segments, organizations are able to truly get to know each individual customer, transforming years of transaction records into meaningful insight on future events. They also reveal frustrations; technologies that hinder rather than help their business intelligence programs.

Netezza is concentrating our appliance philosophy, improving performance with value and simplicity in the data warehouse, on broader challenges. Our products help customers attain their goals, making it easy for them to manage their data from the time transactions and events are captured to their delivery. The result? Organizations are able to use data analytics to make informed decisions and take guided actions. While other vendors may claim this capability, none makes it easy.

Netezza is unique; our appliances shield our customers from the complexities of “how,” freeing them to focus on what can be achieved. Our vision is to provide the infrastructure required to support the next generation of analytics. During our own user conference, I spoke of Netezza's strategy to extend our capability “deeper, higher, wider,” and to do so while maintaining a unified system, which appears to the users as a single data resource. Deeper describes our pushing advanced analytics capabilities deeper into the appliance, closer to the data and supporting operations that go beyond the capabilities of SQL reporting. Higher is our partner-driven business strategy that moves us up the applications stack to address commonly encountered industry applications that have a need for speed. Wider sees us broadening our family of appliances, with multiple products each specialized to its task. Unified sees data flowing seamlessly around an analytics infrastructure; ensuring data’s availability on the infrastructure appropriate to the task at hand (dare I say appliances interoperating with the cloud?) and appearing as a single resource to applications and their users. Achieving all this with minimal intervention by technicians to further reduce costs.

These are exciting times for companies that will be the beneficiaries of business analytics, and while Oracle's latest moves have thrust this issue into the mainstream, it has done very little to advance the state of the art.