LAS VEGAS-Data warehouse appliance vendor Netezza May 20 will announce its biggest business partnership to date, an OEM agreement with EMC, the world’s largest storage infrastructure company.
Netezza will include EMC’s Clariion network storage in its data warehouse appliance as part of the OEM deal to deliver new appliance-based packages designed to simplify the aggregation of business intelligence across the enterprise.
BI in this sense is the aggregation of information stored in an enterprise system that can be used to business advantage by the system owner.
“This a great opportunity for both companies,” Phil Francisco, Netezza’s vice president of product management and marketing, told eWEEK. “This new partnership bolsters our capability to automate enterprise data management operations for our customers and will allow us to further increase our footprint in the market through comarketing initiatives.”
EMC enters data warehousing
EMC, strangely enough, has no data warehousing products and services leading up to this partnership.
EMC President and CEO Joe Tucci, responding to eWEEK during a question-and-answer press conference on May 19, denied that his company would be getting into the BI sector anytime soon, however.
“There’s already a lot of players in that market,” Tucci said. “We’re going to stick to the infrastructure side of the business and partner for the BI needs.”
Hence the deal with Netezza, EMC’s newest partner. The companies’ corporate headquarters are located near each other in Massachusetts, with Netezza’s in Framingham and EMC’s in Hopkinton.
EMC is continuing a hot streak of financial success. Click here to read about what CEO Joe Tucci says is coming next.Netezza will combine the EMC Clariion AX4 network storage array with the Netezza Performance Server data warehouse appliance to deliver new configurations that address new enterprise operational demands, Francisco said.These configurations will deliver near-line storage capacity and data staging capability for loading, backup and disaster recovery activities, allowing customers to stage large-scale data movement operations at whatever time they deem best, he said. Most large-scale conventional data movement operations must be conducted late at night or on weekends, mandating inconvenient work hours for IT staff members.
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By offering customers a flexible and scalable way to fundamentally simplify critical and complex data center operations, Netezza will provide a simplified way for customers to approach these functions,
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said Chuck Hollis, EMC
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s vice president and global marketing chief technology officer.These configurations will be sold, delivered, deployed and supported as integral capabilities of the Netezza appliance. The new EMC-Netezza configurations will be available in the second half of 2008, Francisco said.