Who is Netezza whom IBM has lured?

BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM needs no introduction, however Netezza Corporation needs a bit, now that IBM has decided to acquire it.

Netezza is a Marlborough, Massachusetts-based company that was founded in 2000 that designs and markets data warehouse appliances and analytics applications for enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.

Also Read: EMC takes on Oracle with Greenplum buy

Netezza, which was incorporated in Delaware on August 18, 2000 as Intelligent Data Engines Inc. later on changed its name to Netezza Corporation in November 2000 and in July 2007, it went public.

Netezza has 19 offices in more than 12 countries, including the UK, Japan, China and Germany and as of August, 2010 it has a workforce of 469 employees. Most of Netezza's business continues to be in the United States, and much of the rest in the United Kingdom.

Jim Baum, the company CEO, was appointed in January, 2008 after its founder Jit Saxena announced his retirement.

As of September 2010, the primary vertical markets into which Netezza sells are digital media, energy and utilities, retailing, telecommunications, financial services, health care, and government. As of September 2010, the company reported 373 customers worldwide for its primary product, up from 191 in July, 2008.

TwinFin, Netezza’s primary product, is designed to analyse data volumes scaling into petabytes. The company introduced the fourth generation of the TwinFin product in August, 2009. Netezza also introduced a scaled-down version of this appliance under the Skimmer brand in January, 2010.

In August, 2009, with the introduction of the 4th generation TwinFin product, Netezza moved from proprietary blades to IBM blades.

Netezza’s main competitors include Oracle Exadata and Teradata, and also include IBM, Sybase IQ, Aster Data Systems and Greenplum.

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Netezza AMPP architecture
Netezza's appliances use a proprietary Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing (AMPP)  architecture that combines open, blade-based servers and disk storage with a proprietary data filtering process using Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Netezza’s AMPP architecture is a two-tiered system designed to quickly handle very large queries from multiple users.

The first tier is a high-performance Linux SMP host that compiles data query tasks received from business intelligence applications, and generates query execution plans. It then divides a query into a sequence of sub-tasks, or snippets that can be executed in parallel, and distributes the snippets to the second tier for execution.

The second tier consists of one to hundreds of snippet processing blades, or S-Blades, where all the primary processing work of the appliance is executed. The S-Blades are intelligent processing nodes that make up the massively parallel processing (MPP) engine of the appliance.

Each S-Blade is an independent server that contains multi-core Intel-based CPUs and Netezza’s proprietary multi-engine, high-throughput FPGAs. The S-Blade is composed of a standard blade-server combined with a special Netezza Database Accelerator card which snaps alongside the blade.

Each S-Blade is, in turn, connected to multiple disk drives processing multiple data streams in parallel in TwinFin or Skimmer.

Source: Wikipedia