Netezza did something revolutionary in the Data Warehouse space. They revolutionized, simplified, and packaged parallelism in a way that was just not done before. They simply got it right. Think about it. Netezza offered an extremely fast product with standards based SQL and connectivity at a price Teradata wouldn’t try to beat. 

Today you see a lot of traction with columnar databases. Rightfully so, when you understand the columnar approach and the minimization of I/O offered by technologies like Vertica it is a no-brainer to give it a try. Are we seeing a paradigm shift today as we saw when Netezza first launched their MPP appliance? Probably, but I think the road for Netezza is still pretty golden.

Netezza trumps the MPP space. Going public has validate not only the company but the technology. They have taken the survivability and risk of adoption question out of the picture. In doing so, Netezza has cleared the field and paved the way for technologies like Vertica and Paraccel.

My guess is that over time, Netezza will win quite a few Teradata clients. As the capitalization of the Teradata investments come to an end, the need for increased storage capacity will grow. Faced with investing into more nodes, companies would be wise to re-evaluate their Teradata strategy and consider Netezza. (Given of course they are not locked into Teradata by purchasing the additional logical models or applications that run on it)

Netezza will grab market share from Teradata and in doing so they just may keep NeoView in the gate for years to come. Oracle just doesn’t understand this space so at present, I don’t see any competitive threat from Larry for MPP architectures. I wouldn’t be surprised if Oracle made a bid for one of the Columnar databases though. (I would prefer however; that they stick with OLTP instead of misleading people into believing they can build large scale Query and Reporting databases on OLTP technologies.)

If my hunch is correct, this opens up a tremendous opportunity for technologies like Vertica. I believe Netezza sees a great opportunity for C-Stores and surprisingly may welcome the competition to the space.

I believe Netezza is focusing on the “prize”. I would assume that they want to be known as “The Brand” for Petabyte data warehouses. Technically there may be no size limit with Vertica, Paraccel, or Sybase. It is however my feeling that if an organization is crunching that much data, they will lean toward Teradata or Netezza.

So I believe Vertica, Paraccel, Aster, GreenPlum, etc… owes Netezza a few “props”. The success they are about to have is related to Netezza’s work in this space.