Partners: Netezza

For the CIO, it's an integrated database-analytics and data warehouse appliance that's changing the price/performance rules of the data center. For the line-of-business manager, it's a lightning-fast way to analyze terabytes of actionable customer information. For the CEO, it's the secret weapon to tap into the invisible profit center: the data warehouse. And for customers like Acxiom Corporation, Ahold USA, Amazon.com, Capital One, Cingular Wireless, CNET Networks, Neiman Marcus, TELUS Mobility, The TJX Companies and others, it's simply Netezza.

In an environment where corporate decision making is based on massive data-driven analyses, the Netezza Performance Server® (NPS®) data warehouse appliance delivers 10-100 times the performance—at half the cost—of traditional data warehouse systems from Oracle, IBM, Teradata and others. With Netezza, companies are gaining real-time insights into their data and fundamentally changing the way they leverage their data warehouses and make decisions.

Designed as a data warehouse appliance that integrates database, server and storage, the NPS system stores, filters and processes terabytes of data within a single unit, analyzing only the relevant information for each query. The system's advantage is in its patent-pending Intelligent Query Streaming™ design: Netezza has placed processing power next to the data, so data analysis occurs at the source at streaming speeds, delivering an unprecedented boost in performance. Analyses that took days now take just seconds. This means a dramatic increase in productivity across the organization. Time isn't spent running queries and maintaining the database; it's spent leveraging business intelligence to make smarter business decisions, ask better questions and, ultimately, make more money.

The NPS system combines commodity hardware components with Linux and a high-performance database, resulting in dramatically lower total cost of ownership. In addition, the standards-based NPS system offers simplicity and elegance: the entire system comes in a self-contained, single-vendor rack that integrates easily into existing BI environments; its "load and go" implementation process takes hours, not weeks; and there's no need for intensive database administration and system management. In short, the NPS system is a fast, affordable data warehouse appliance that's easy to deploy, use and maintain, offering organizations a distinct competitive advantage and the power to question everything.