HP and Neoview
Discussion of computer giant HP, especially its efforts in data warehousing and business intelligence. Covered are both HP’s own data warehouse appliance Neoview and its partnerships with other software vendors. Related subjects include:
Vertica update – HP appliance deal, customer information, and more
Vertica quietly announced an appliance bundling deal with HP and Red Hat today. That got me quickly onto the phone with Vertica’s Andy Ellicott, to discuss a few different subjects. Most interesting was the part about Vertica’s customer base, highlights of which included:
- Vertica’s claim to have “50” customers includes a bunch of unpaid licenses, many of them in academia.
- Vertica has about 15 paying customers.
- Based on conversations with mutual prospects, Vertica believes that’s more customers than DATAllegro has. (Of course, each DATAllegro sale is bigger than one of Vertica’s. Even so, I hope Vertica is wrong in its estimate, since DATAllegro told me its customer count was “double digit” quite a while ago.)
- Most Vertica customers manage over 1 terabyte of user data. A couple have bought licenses showing they intend to manage 20 terabytes or so.
- Vertica’s biggest customer/application category – existing customers and sales pipelines alike – is call detail records for telecommunications companies. (Other data warehouse specialists also have activity in the CDR area.). Major applications are billing assurance (getting the inter-carrier charges right) and marketing analysis. Call center uses are still in the future.
- Vertica’s other big market to date is investment research/tick history. Surely not coincidentally, this is a big area of focus for Mike Stonebraker, evidently at both companies for which he’s CTO. (The other, of course, is StreamBase.)
- Runners-up in market activity are clickstream analysis and general consumer analytics. These seem to be present in Vertica’s pipeline more than in the actual customer base.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business Objects, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, HP and Neoview, RDF and graphs, Vertica Systems | 5 Comments |
Gartner 2007 Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems
February, 2011 edit: I’ve now commented on Gartner’s 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management System Magic Quadrant as well.
It’s early autumn, the leaves are turning in New England, and Gartner has issued another Magic Quadrant for data warehouse DBMS. (Edit: As of January, 2009, that link is dead but this one works.) The big winners vs. last year are Greenplum and, secondarily, Sybase. Teradata continues to lead. Oracle has also leapfrogged IBM, and there are various other minor adjustments as well, among repeat mentionees Netezza, DATAllegro, Sand, Kognitio, and MySQL. HP isn’t on the radar yet; ditto Vertica. Read more
Yet more on petabyte-scale Teradata databases
I managed to buttonhole Teradata’s Darryl MacDonald again, to follow up on yesterday’s brief chat. He confirmed that there are more than one petabyte+ Teradata databases out there, of which at least one is commercial rather than government/classified. Without saying who any of them were, he dropped a hint suggestive of Wal-Mart. That makes sense, given that a 423 terabyte figure for Wal-Mart is now three years old, and Wal-Mart is in the news for its 4 petabyte futures. Yes, that news has tended to mention HP NeoView recently more than Teradata. But it seems very implausible that a NeoView replacement of Teradata has already happened, if if such a thing is a possibility for the future. So right now however much data Wal-Mart has on its path from 423 terabytes to 4 petabytes and beyond is probably collected mainly on Teradata machines.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, HP and Neoview, Petabyte-scale data management, Teradata | 1 Comment |
The four horsemen of data warehousing
I’ve been talking a lot to text mining vendors this week, as per a series of posts over on Text Technologies. Specifically, I’ve focused on the two with exhaustive extraction strategies, namely Attensity and Clarabridge. (Exhaustive extraction is Attensity’s term for separating the linguistic-analysis part of text mining from the DBMS-based BI/analytics part.)
So I asked each of Attensity and Clarabridge the side question as to which data warehouse software or appliances they were seeing. The answers were almost identical — Oracle, Microsoft SQL*Server, Teradata, and Netezza. One also mentioned MySQL and 2 HP prospects — but the HP sites were running NonStop SQL, not NeoView. Amazingly, there were no mentions of DB2. There also weren’t any mentions of the smaller specialist startups, such as DATAllegro, Greenplum, or Vertica.
HP Neoview — smoke or fire?
The consistently outstanding blog Serious About Consulting has a detailed article about HP Neoview. I must admit, however, to some skepticism about the Neoview project. Edit: As of September, 2008, that’s a dead link, and the blog has been replaced by spam junk. Part of this is just the fact that a data warehouse appliance outfit that’s never gotten around to briefing me — ever — clearly doesn’t have its marketing act together. 😉 Also, I’ve never heard much about them competitively from anybody except Greenplum.
That said — as Jerry Held reminded me in a recent Vertica-related call, there’s no cosmic architectural reason why they couldn’t make it work. And if anybody’s going to see HP first competitively, it’s going to be Sun/Greenplum and maybe Teradata, and I’ll confess to not having chatted with Teradata for approximately six months.