Telecommunications
Posts about database and analytic technologies applied to the telecommunications industry, especially in call detail record (CDR) applications. Related subjects include:
Vertica customer notes
Dave Menninger of Vertica called to discuss NDA product futures, as vendors tend to do in the weeks before a TDWI conference. So we also talked a bit about the Vertica customer base. That’s listed as 86 at the end of Q2, up from 74 in Q1. That’s pretty small growth compared with Q1, which Dave didn’t fully explain. But then, off the top of his head, he was recalling Q1 numbers as being lower than that 74, so maybe there’s a reporting glitch in the loop somewhere.
Vertica’s two biggest customer segments are telecommunications and financial services, and Dave drew an interesting distinction between what the two groups care about. Telecom companies care about data warehouses that are big and 24/7 reliable, but don’t do particularly complex analytics. Financial services — by which he presumably means mainly proprietary traders — are most focused on complex and competitively innovative analytics.
Also mentioned in various contexts were web-based outfits such as data mart outsourcers, social networkers, and open-source software providers.
Vertica also offers customer win stories in other segments, but most actual discussion about what Vertica does revolves around the application areas mentioned above, just as it has been in the past.
Similar (not necessarily identical) generalizations would be true of many other analytic DBMS vendors.
Netezza Q1 earning call transcript
I finally read the Netezza Q1 earnings call transcript, put out by Seeking Alpha. Highlights included:
- Netezza got 14 new-name accounts and 21 follow-on deals. Average sale in both groups was right around $1 million.
- The economy is tough, deals are slipping, and nobody knows for sure what will happen.
- Netezza’s main head-to-head competitors are Oracle and Teradata. Netezza claims good but not perfect win rates against each, but concedes that those vendors (especially Oracle) of course get other deals Netezza never sees.
- Netezza characterizes Teradata as offering its multiple product lines, trying to upsell many customers from cheaper to more expensive product lines, and being selectively aggressive about pricing. None of this is surprising to me.
- 80% of Netezza’s Q1 revenue, and perhaps even a higher fraction of new-name accounts, was in four vertical markets: “Digital media,” telecom, government, and financial services.
- Some time over the next few months, Netezza will give at least some more clarity about future products.
One tip for the Netezza folks, by the way, from this former stock analyst — you should never use the word “certainly” about a deal you haven’t closed yet. “Almost surely” could be OK, but “certainly” — well, it certainly was not the thing to say.
HP and Neoview update
I had lunch with some HP folks at TDWI. Highlights (burgers and jokes aside) included:
- HP’s BI consulting (especially the former Knightsbridge) and analytic product groups (including Neoview) are now tightly integrated.
- HP is trying to develop and pitch “solutions” where it has particular “intellectual property.” This IP can come from ordinary product engineering or internal use, because HP Labs serves both sides of the business. Specific examples offered included:
- Telecom. Apparently, HP made specialized data warehouse devices for CDRs (Call Detail Records) long ago, and claims this has been area of particular expertise ever since.
- Supply chain – based on HP’s internal experiences.
- Customer relationship – ditto
- The main synergy suggested between consulting and Neoview is that HP’s experts work on talking buyers into such a complex view of their requirements that only Neoview (supposedly) can fit the bill.
- HP insists there are indeed new Neoview sales.
- Neoview sales seem to be concentrated in what Aster might call “frontline” applications — i.e., low latency, OLTP-like uptime requirements, etc.
- HP says it did an actual 80 TB POC. I asked whether this was for an 80 TB app or something a lot bigger, but didn’t get a clear answer.
Given the emphasis on trying to exploit HP’s other expertise in the data warehousing business, I suggested it was a pity that HP spun off Agilent (HP’s instrumentation division, aka HP Classic). Nobody much disagreed.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, HP and Neoview, Telecommunications | 4 Comments |
Infobright update
Infobright briefed me, and I thought it would be best to invite them to provide a write-up themselves of what customer and other information they did and didn’t want to disclose, for me to publish. Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Data warehousing, Infobright, Open source, Telecommunications, Web analytics | 2 Comments |
Data warehouse load speeds in the spotlight
Syncsort and Vertica combined to devise and run a benchmark in which a data warehouse got loaded at 5 ½ terabytes per hour, which is several times faster than the figures used in any other vendors’ similar press releases in the past. Takeaways include:
- Syncsort isn’t just a mainframe sort utility company, but also does data integration. Who knew?
- Vertica’s design to overcome the traditional slow load speed of columnar DBMS works.
The latter is unsurprising. Back in February, I wrote at length about how Vertica makes rapid columnar updates. I don’t have a lot of subsequent new detail, but it made sense then and now. Read more
Oracle Database Machine performance and compression
Greg Rahn was kind enough to recite in his blog what Oracle has disclosed about the first Exadata testers. I don’t track hardware model details, so I don’t know how the testers’ respective current hardware environments compare to that of the Oracle Database Machine.
Each of the customers cited below received “half” an Oracle Database Machine. As I previously noted, an Oracle Database Machine holds either 14.0 or 46.2 terabytes of uncompressed data. This suggests the 220 TB customer listed below — LGR Telecommunications — got compression of a little under 10:1 for a CDR (Call Detail Record) database. By comparison, Vertica claims 8:1 compression on CDRs.
Greg also writes of POS (Point Of Sale) data being used for the demo. If you do the arithmetic on the throughput figures (13.5 vs. a little over 3), compression was a little under 4.5:1. I don’t know what other vendors claim for POS compression.
Here are the details Greg posted about the four most open Oracle Database Machine tests: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Database compression, Exadata, Oracle, Telecommunications | 9 Comments |
Some of Oracle’s largest data warehouses
Googling around, I came across an Oracle presentation – given some time this year – that lists some of Oracle’s largest data warehouses. 10 databases total are listed with >16 TB, which is fairly consistent with Larry Ellison’s confession during the Exadata announcement that Oracle has trouble over 10 TB (which is something I’ve gotten a lot of flack from a few Oracle partisans for pointing out … 😀 ).
However, what’s being measured is probably not the same in all cases. For example, I think the Amazon 70 TB figure is obviously for spinning disk (elsewhere in the presentation it’s stated that Amazon has 71 TB of disk). But the 16 TB British Telecom figure probably is user data — indeed, it’s the same figure Computergram cited for BT user data way back in 2001.
The list is: Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Oracle, Specific users, Telecommunications, Yahoo | 6 Comments |
Peter Batty on Netezza Spatial
As previously noted, I’m not up to speed on Netezza Spatial. Phil Francisco of Netezza has promised we’ll fix that ASAP. In the mean time, I found a blog by a guy named Peter Batty, who evidently:
- Knows a lot about geospatial data and its uses
- Is consulting to Netezza
- Is smart
Batty offers a lot of detail in two recent posts, intermixed with some gollygeewhiz about Netezza in general. If you’re interested in this stuff, Batty’s blog is well worth checking out. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, GIS and geospatial, Netezza, Telecommunications | 2 Comments |
Netezza application areas
I’m at the Netezza “Enzee” user conference in Orlando. So one or more Netezza posts are in order.
One theme of the brief analyst meeting was Netezza’s increasing business focus on vertical markets. In particular, Netezza is hiring managers for a range of vertical markets. The commercial ones cited (at various levels of maturity) included: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Market share and customer counts, Netezza, Telecommunications | Leave a Comment |
More mysteries regarding Oracle CDR load speed
Last spring, DATAllegro user John Devolites of TEOCO told me of troubles his firm had had loading CDRs (Call Detail Records) into Oracle, and how those had been instrumental in his eventual adoption of DATAllegro. That claim was contemptously challenged in a couple of comment threads.
Well, tonight at the Netezza user conference, Netezza gave awards to its first customers. The very first to accept was Jim Hayden, who’d bought Netezza for a company called Vibrant Solutions, which coincidentally was later acquired by TEOCO itself. In front of hundreds of people, he talked about how, back in 2003, it had taken 23 hours to load 400 million CDRs into Oracle on Nextel’s behalf, but only 40 minutes on Netezza.
And I’ll erase the rest of what I’d drafted here, as it was dripping in sarcasm …
| Categories: Data warehousing, Netezza, Oracle, Telecommunications, TEOCO | 2 Comments |