Dataupia
Analysis of data warehouse appliance vendor Dataupia and its products. Related subjects include:
Dataupia is officially for sale
Dataupia marketing VP Samantha Stone — who by the way has been one heck of a trooper through Dataupia’s troubles — is joining the exodus from the company. General graciousness aside, the heart of Samantha’s farewell email reads:
Unfortunately, we have had to reduce our burn rate as we seek an acquirer for our technology.
We have a group of loyal employees remaining on staff focused on current production customers and the acquisition efforts.
As part of the most recent staff reductions I will be leaving Dataupia.
Two years ago I wrote:
[Dataupia would] make a great acquisition for a BI company or DBMS vendor who could then say “Oh, no, this isn’t a DBMS appliance – it’s merely a data warehouse accelerator.” When you look at it that way, their chances of prospering look distinctly higher.
But at this point I think there probably would be more appealing ways for those vendors to meet the same needs.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability | 14 Comments |
“The Netezza price point”
Over the past couple of years, quite a few data warehouse appliance or DBMS vendors have talked to me directly in terms of “Netezza’s price point,” or some similar phrase. Some have indicated that they’re right around the Netezza price point, but think their products are superior to Netezza’s. Others have stressed the large gap between their price and Netezza’s. But one way or the other, “Netezza’s price” has been an industry metric.
One reason everybody talks about the “Netezza (list) price” is that it hasn’t been changing much, seemingly staying stable at $50-60K/terabyte for a long time. And thus Teradata’s 2550 and Oracle’s larger-disk Exadata configuration — both priced more or less in the same range — have clearly been price-competitive with Netezza since their respective introductions.
That just changed. Netezza is cutting its pricing to the $20K/terabyte range imminently, with further cuts to come. So where does that leave competitors?
- The Teradata 1550 is in the Netezza price range (still a little below, actually).
- Oracle basically has nothing price-competitive with Netezza.
- Microsoft has stated it plans to introduce Madison below the old DATAllegro price points; conceivably, that could be competitive with Netezza’s new pricing, although I haven’t checked as to how much it now costs simply to buy a lot of SQL Server licenses (which presumably would be a Madison lower bound, and might except for hardware be the whole thing, since Microsoft likes to create large product bundles).
- XtremeData just launched in the new Netezza price range.
- Troubled Dataupia is hard to judge. While on the surface Dataupia’s prices sound very low, you can’t use a Dataupia box unless you also have a brand-name DBMS (license and hardware) alongside it. That obviously affects total cost significantly.
- Kickfire seems unaffected, as it doesn’t and most likely won’t compete with Netezza (different database size ranges).
- For the most part, software-only vendors are free to adapt or not as they choose. Hardware prices generally don’t need to be over $10K/terabyte, and in some cases could be a lot less. So the question is how far they’re willing to discount their software.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Exadata, Kickfire, Oracle, Pricing, Teradata, XtremeData | 14 Comments |
Two lessons from Dataupia’s troubles
I’ve been beating my head against the wall trying to convince startups of two well-established truisms:
- Experience consistently shows that the demand for transparency/emulation features isn’t as great as entrepreneurs hope.
- If a startup’s competitors sell directly to enterprises, an indirect sales strategy rarely succeeds.
Maybe one or the other will learn from Dataupia’s example.
Dataupia’s troubles are now confirmed
Todd Fin pointed me yesterday to an article by Wade Roush that confirmed in detail layoffs and other troubles at Dataupia. The article quotes Dataupia marketing VP Samantha Stone as saying Dataupia is down to 23 employees, and that some of the layoffs were in engineering. This is consistent with what I’d been hearing for a while, namely that other analytic DBMS vendors were seeing a flood of Dataupia resumes, especially technical ones.
The article goes on to discuss difficulties Dataupia has had in raising another round of financing. During Dataupia’s very long CEO search — which I kept hearing about from people who’d been approached for the job — it was obvious money wouldn’t come in until a CEO was found. But it seems that even with a new CEO, existing investors are reluctant to re-up without a new investor as well, and that new investment is slow in happening.
On the plus side, the article quotes Samantha as saying founder Foster Hinshaw is recovering well from his heart surgery.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability | 3 Comments |
DBMS transparency layers never seem to sell well
A DBMS transparency layer, roughly speaking, is software that makes things that are written for one brand of database management system run unaltered on another.* These never seem to sell well. ANTs has failed in a couple of product strategies. EnterpriseDB’s Oracle compatibility only seems to have netted it a few sales, and only a small fraction of its total business. ParAccel’s and Dataupia’s transparency strategies have produced even less.
*The looseness in that definition highlights a key reason these technologies don’t sell well — it’s hard to be sure that what you’re buying will do a good job of running your particular apps.
This subject comes to mind for two reasons. One is that IBM seems to have licensed EnterpriseDB’s Oracle transparency layer for DB2. The other is that a natural upgrade path from MySQL to Oracle might be a MySQL transparency layer on top of an Oracle base.
| Categories: ANTs Software, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, IBM and DB2, Market share and customer counts, MySQL, Oracle, ParAccel | 11 Comments |
Declaration of Data Independence (humor)
The data warehouse appliance industry has a well-developed funny bone. Dataupia’s contribution is a Declaration of Data Independence, which begins:
When in the Course of an increasingly competitive global economy it becomes necessary for one data set to dissolve its connections to a constraining environment, the separate but inherently unequal station to which the Laws of Whose budget is larger prevails.
Related links:
- Cartoons from DATAllegro
- April Fool press release from Netezza
Oracle’s hefty price increases
Jeff Jones of IBM wrote in to point out that Oracle is slathering on the price increases. I quote: Read more
| Categories: Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability, EnterpriseDB and Postgres Plus, Oracle | 5 Comments |
Positioning the data warehouse appliances and specialty DBMS
There now are four hardware vendors that each offer or seem about to announce two different tiers of data warehouse appliances: Sun, HP, EMC, and Teradata. Specifically:
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Sun partners with both Greenplum and ParAccel.
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HP sells Neoview, and also is partnered with Vertica.
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EMC (together with Dell in North America and Bull in Europe) sells DATAllegro. Now EMC is also entering a partnership with ParAccel.
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Teradata is pretty far down the road toward releasing a low-end product.
Dataupia catch-up
I had a catch-up phone meeting with Dataupia, since I hadn’t spoke with the company since the middle of last year. Like several other companies in the data warehouse specialist market, Dataupia can be annoyingly secretive. On the plus side – and this is very refreshing — Dataupia doesn’t seem to expect credit for accomplishments beyond those they’re willing to provide actual evidence for.
What I’ve gleaned about Dataupia’s customer activity to date amounts to: Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Dataupia, Emulation, transparency, portability | 1 Comment |
A quick survey of data warehouse management technology
There are at least 16 different vendors offering appliances and/or software that do database management primarily for analytic purposes.* That’s a lot to keep up with,. So I’ve thrown together a little overview of the analytic data management landscape, liberally salted with links to information about specific vendors, products, or technical issues. In some ways, this is a companion piece to my prior post about data warehouse appliance myths and realities.
*And that’s just the tabular/alphanumeric guys. Add in text search and you run the total a lot higher.
Numerous data warehouse specialists offer traditional row-based relational DBMS architectures, but optimize them for analytic workloads. These include Teradata, Netezza, DATAllegro, Greenplum, Dataupia, and SAS. All of those except SAS are wholly or primarily vendors of MPP/shared-nothing data warehouse appliances. EDIT: See the comment thread for a correction re Kognitio.
Numerous data warehouse specialists offer column-based relational DBMS architectures. These include Sybase (with the Sybase IQ product, originally from Expressway), Vertica, ParAccel, Infobright, Kognitio (formerly White Cross), and Sand. Read more