IBM Counters a Misinformation Machine

IBM’s latest advertising offers a counterpoint to ambitious claims made for Exadata by Redwood Shores’ Mad Men. At IBM’s Pulse 2011 event industry analyst Colin White presented results of a survey he and Claudia Imhoff have undertaken for The Data Warehousing Institute. 74% of those surveyed needed faster time-to-value from their analytic and technology deployments. Colin’s analysis is that technology should to be "fast to deploy", "scalable" and largely "self-service". I’ll investigate each of these, contrasting Oracle Exadata with IBM Netezza as evidenced by real world experience.

Based on personal experience, Bryan Grenn counsels on Configuring Exadata, “The advice I would give, is plan on this process taking a long time”. Contrast this to the simplicity Netezza customers enjoy. [Please note that since we published, Grenn's blog post has been revised to remove the reference above -- here's the original post] “The way we did a proof of concept with them [Netezza] was, they shipped us a box, we put it into our data center and plugged into our network," he said. "Within 24 hours, we were up and running. I'm not exaggerating, it was that easy” asserts Joseph Essas, VP of Technology at eHarmony in CIO Magazine article EHarmony Finds Data Warehouse Match with Netezza. “Netezza: simply fast to deploy.

While size isn’t everything, scalability is important to organizations experiencing enormous growth in their data. In January 27, 2011 edition of InformationWeek Doug Henschen appears unconvinced of Exadata’s scaling credentials “I have to say I'm not bowled over by the scale of the Exadata deployments I've seen thus far”. In his article The Big Data Era: How Data Strategy Will Change the same author discusses Catalina Marketing extracting value from petabyte-scale data on Netezza. Netezza: simply scalable.

The new wave of analytic applications is business-driven; successful technologies enable while getting out of the road. Steve Taff, Executive Director of IT Services at XO Communications comments “Allowing the business users access to the Netezza box was what sold it. Watch Danny Sangster, Senior Manager of Enterprise BI at XO Communications tell of unearthing savings with Cognos and Netezza, a task they found impossible with Oracle. Netezza: simply self-service.

Complex technologies diminish the value of data warehousing and analytics. Exadata is complicated. Netezza is simply better. Learn more here.