I was reading a post from my CEO Jim Baum Viewing Open World with an Open Mind. The general theme is exactly what I would expect from the CEO of a company that is clearly the leader in its space. As a matter of fact in my humble opinion Netezza is the only true appliance company and without a doubt the only producer of an analytic machine that meets the definition of an appliance according to Merriam-Webster - appliance – “a piece of equipment for adapting a tool or machine to a special purpose”. The other major characteristic of an appliance is simplicity. There should be very little to do other then make a few settings and hit the start button.  

I am looking for the individual that can show me any other appliance that you stand up on day one, load and query data on day two and immediately realize performance that is mind blowing without any tuning. There is none other than Netezza. Oracle is an appliance in assembly,  but not in functionality, and as such does not meet the definition. Think about it - does a refrigerator also cook your food?

Netezza gets this and continues to improve its capabilities to include new and powerful capabilities while maintaining the characteristics, operations and most importantly the simplicity of an appliance. Jim Baum is focused on the customer, their needs, and their satisfaction. This customer focus has been a core tenet of Netezza since the beginning when I was a customer – and bred into the culture by former CEO and Founder Jit Saxena who is today Chairman of the Board. Simplicity is core to the product and core to conducting business.

At different times in my career I  have been a  user ,  an employee and a  of course a  customer of Oracle. Oracle is reactionary for sure as demonstrated by my interaction  with them  in 2002 as a customer looking at Netezza for analytics. At that time I  suggested to  a senior executive at Oracle that they take a look at this technology because in reality Oracle did not have a good answer for dealing with large volumes of data in an analytic environment. His response to me was “Bob appliances are going nowhere”. No matter how you look at it Oracle took their eye off the ball and reacted to a market instead of planning for it. This is what differentiates Netezza from Oracle and the rest of the pack.

Jim wrote about   Netezza’s three areas of focus being  deeper, wider and higher analytics. Deeper is  especially  exciting. The ability to hide the parallelism from the developer who can build and execute non-database complex algorithms without  having to  deal with code that organizes and breaks up the data across a complex infrastructure  for performance is amazing. Wider will provide advancements that will take on the future of business intelligence and complex analytics as defined by the marketplace and implemented by the company that recognized a different approach was needed to service the demand for using data to find the cracks where the opportunity for additional revenue  may have fallen  through.  Higher is another game - changer and partners are beginning to produce and brand appliances from Netezza that contain end-to-end functionality for solving specific business analytic and reporting challenges without the need to deal with infrastructure. In the not too distant future we will see a fully connected intelligent data exchange that is defined by the business and requires very little technical and operations staff to deploy and manage.

Any business that needs to compete in today’s volatile business environment has got to use their data intelligently to make quick decisive decisions based on current customer actions to stay ahead of the pack. The smart ones are using Netezza and the rest will be. Too many technologists today think that the complexity is necessary and I am here to tell you that KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is still the best approach and the leader of SIMPLE is Netezza.

- First Liberated