IBM closed on its acquisition of Netezza, and opened up a bit about where it sees Netezza fitting into its organization.
On Nov. 11 IBM announced it had closed on its $1.7
billion acquisition of data warehousing vendor Netezza, making
good on an announcement it
made in late September.
At the time of the September announcement, IBM said the
acquisition was driven largely by a desire to bring Netezza's analytic
capabilities in-house. With the deal now signed and sealed, Bernie
Spang, director of strategy and marketing for IBM Information
Management Software, shared with eWEEK some of the company's thoughts
on its latest prize.
At the moment, the company is evaluating integration opportunities
between Netezza and IBM products, he said. The timeline for any
integration is still being determined, but the ultimate goal is for
Netezza's data warehouse appliances to complement the flexibility of
the IBM Smart Analytics System and InfoSphere Warehouse software, he
added.
"With the addition of Netezza, IBM can offer clients the most
efficient and effective options for how they deploy, manage and
maintain their data," Spang said. "Options range from the simplicity of
tightly integrated black box appliances to the flexibility of fully
customized combinations of software and hardware."
Netezza, he said, will accelerate IBM's data warehouse and business analytics initiatives by "
bringing the power of analytics directly
into the hands of business users within every department of an
organization such as sales, marketing, product development and human
resources and into midsized enterprises."
"We will focus on specific client needs and address each environment
based on clients existing needs and future requirements," Spang added.
"Our clients are likely to have multiple analytic applications which
may be best served with a combination of approaches."
"For instance," he said, "a solution may require optimizing both
analytic and real-time transactional queries and thus require the
flexibility of InfoSphere Warehouse software - either integrated with
Cognos BI in a Smart Analytics System or in a custom solution
configuration. The same client may have other applications that require
high performance analytics with little if any tuning and where speed of
deployment - like in days - is a paramount requirement. Netezza
appliances may provide the most cost effective way to accelerate these
solutions and a broader use of analytics across all parts of the
business."
In a blog post after
the deal was announced in September, Forrester Research analyst James
Kobielus wrote that Netezza could help IBM compete in a price war
in the data warehousing market.
"Netezza's offerings do overlap to some degree with the extensive
IBM Smart Analytics System (ISAS) product family, which integrates its
widely adopted DB2 relational database and other software solutions
with an all-IBM hardware layer," he blogged. "However, IBM has not
jumped into the price war heretofore with pricing equivalent to Netezza
TwinFin or Oracle Exadata, and it has no commercial ISAS-based
offerings anywhere in shouting range of $20,000 per terabyte...We expect
IBM to rapidly position Netezza's offerings, under its ISAS big
top, as its principal data-mart accelerators for both large
enterprises and the midmarket."
Spang said the company will continue the Netezza focus on meeting client needs for high performance and simplicity.
"Our clients now have a number of options for deploying data
warehouse platforms for their analytics applications - from custom
defined and integrated combinations of software and hardware...(to)
appliances that are more focused for a specific configuration and thus
even easier to deploy and manage," Spang said.
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