January 15, 2009

Netezza’s marketing goes retro again

Netezza loves retro images in its marketing, such as classic rock lyrics, or psychedelic paint jobs on its SPUs.  (Given the age demographics at, say, a Teradata or Netezza user conference, this isn’t as nutty as it first sounds.) Netezza’s latest is a creative peoples-liberation/revolution riff, under the name Data Liberators.  The ambience of that site and especially its first download should seem instinctively familiar to anybody who recalls the Symbionese Liberation Army when it was active, or who has ever participated in a chant of “The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated!”

The substance of the first “pamphlet”, so far as I can make out, is that you should only trust vendors who do short, onsite POCs, and Oracle may not do those for Exadata. Unsurprisingly, there was less reference to certain other common POC practices, such as running POCs at the low data/hardware ratio customers will initially purchase rather than the higher ratio they might hope to grow into …

All kidding aside, I think attempts to influence the structure of an evaluation are a legitimate form of marketing.  I further think that many users need unbiased guidance on how to set up and conduct their evaluations, but that’s a subject for other posts (and TDWI courses, and consulting engagements …).

Comments

2 Responses to “Netezza’s marketing goes retro again”

  1. Dave on January 21st, 2009 5:45 pm

    CAM,
    “All kidding aside, I think attempts to influence the structure of an evaluation are a legitimate form of marketing. I further think that many users need unbiased guidance on how to set up and conduct their evaluations”

    Agreed. I have a different conspiracy theory regarding offsite POCs….

    Intangibles… the Mai Tai category

    Never underestimate the power of the “Intangibles” category on product eval matrixes. That ranking can *TRUMP* categories for price, performance, features, power consumption, ease of use, etc. Winning the Intangibles category can be easily accomplished by three weeks of in house wining and dining of the potential customer.

    Sales: Hmmmm… how could we get a captive audience for a few weeks?…

  2. Oracle says they do onsite Exadata POCs after all | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on February 1st, 2009 1:33 am

    […] I first asked Oracle about Netezza’s claim that Oracle doesn’t do onsite Exadata POCs, they blew off the question. Then I showed Oracle an article draft saying they don’t do […]

Leave a Reply




Feed: DBMS (database management system), DW (data warehousing), BI (business intelligence), and analytics technology Subscribe to the Monash Research feed via RSS or email:

Login

Search our blogs and white papers

Monash Research blogs

User consulting

Building a short list? Refining your strategic plan? We can help.

Vendor advisory

We tell vendors what's happening -- and, more important, what they should do about it.

Monash Research highlights

Learn about white papers, webcasts, and blog highlights, by RSS or email.