The "Intelligent Economy" is much more than a trendy buzz phrase or the name of a business school seminar.

It's the new reality for enterprises today.

The Intelligent Economy is about fundamentally changing the way we view our businesses and our customers, about inviting change when we decide change is needed – but also about recognizing what we do that makes sense and valuing it accordingly.

A June, 2010 IDC Vendor Spotlight noted that the “demand to respond faster and with greater insight to ongoing internal and external events based on facts is increasing,” and that “data management and analytics challenges of the intelligent economy are likely to overwhelm organizations unprepared for the emerging changes.” (You can download the PDF of the IDC report here.)

Gut checks and intuition are still valuable when it comes to making management decisions – but actionable, on-demand information from analytics is shaping up to be a key differentiator when it comes to competing these days.

ENTERPRISES MAKE UP THE INTELLIGENT ECONOMY

The Intelligent Economy is made up of "Intelligent Enterprises" – companies and organizations that not only recognize the new reality – but are thriving because of it.

For these enterprises, data isn't viewed as a problem that must be managed and contained. For them, data is a gift that exposes hidden truths about their futures.

We know at Netezza – based on the real-life experiences of our customers – that data is a valuable, sustainable resource that can change the way you view your customers and run your business in fundamental ways - forever.

The ideas that stem from the analytics solutions we enable for our customers are much more than abstract formulas on a virtual chalkboard. They result in real, positive, lasting change. Our technology at Netezza becomes a source of inspiration, a catalyst to a new way of thinking about the way people interact with the world and with each other.

BUSINESS ANALYTICS COME OF AGE

The energy and enthusiasm we experienced at 2010 Enzee Universe this June on Boston's waterfront proved to me that we have reached a tipping point when it comes to accepting data analytics on a much deeper, broader level.

As I said in my keynote address, Netezza embraces a set of core principles that are simply hard for others to reproduce:

• Your success as our customer is our top objective
• We embrace the fact that we are part of an ecosystem of partners and technologies that provide you with a complete solution
• Simplicity is the key to making analytics more accessible and a fundamental driver behind everything we do
• We want to be a company that is easy to do business with and one that is viewed as a partner, not just a vendor
• We value our customers’ input and integrate it into our thinking every day

Many of our customers are solving problems they could previously only DREAM of with a level of agility and simplicity that has allowed them to apply their energy to the business opportunity, freeing them from the complexities of the platform to focus on what really matters, the business solution.

This, in a nutshell, is what is enabling the Intelligent Economy to emerge: the enormous amounts of human time and energy previously required to simply process information can now go toward inspiration, learning, and improving.

Over the next few blog posts, I will be writing about the real-life experiences of some of the Intelligent Enterprises that make up this emerging Intelligent Economy – organizations that are using high-performance data analytics to make critical time-sensitive decisions, predict future events, and change they way they do business for the better, forever. Stay tuned.

There’s so much happening in the world of analytics, business intelligence, and data management that, as the CEO of one of the more exciting companies in this space, I find it impossible not to comment. You can expect to hear from me on a regular basis as I share my personal views on this rapidly changing market and the technologies and business solutions that are driving it.

The world of data, where it comes from, what we do with it, how we manage it, and how we extract value from it is undergoing a fundamental transformation. You can see evidence of this everywhere you look. One particularly fascinating example is the “battle of the titans” between Oracle and IBM as each aggressively positions itself for what it believes to be a massive growth opportunity. If you are anywhere near technology on this planet, you have no doubt seen Oracle’s aggressive advertising campaigns. One of their recent jabs at IBM’s products suggests that while IBM are off building smarter planets, Oracle are busy building smarter computers.

It’s hard to argue with the credibility and the ability to change an industry of either of these giants. IBM have invested literally billions of dollars in developing the Smarter Planet campaign and developing and acquiring the technologies to back it up. They have deployed over $10B of IBM capital to acquire over 35 companies over the past 2 1/2 years to make the capabilities behind Smarter Planet a reality. Oracle have also continued to build their business via acquisition and are telling the world about their “integrated hardware software” approach to building their solutions. While both companies have serious technology in hardware and software, it is interesting that IBM seem to focus their marketing energy on the social and business value of the solutions they can provide and Oracle are focused on the technology of moving application capability “into the silicon”. One thing is clear, this battle for the business of gaining more value from an increasing pool of data assets is just getting started. Just last week, another giant entered the fray. SAP announced its plans to acquire database and mobile solutions vendor Sybase for nearly $6 billion, adding Sybase’s capability to their growing analytics portfolio.

To me, the most important element of this transformation and the companies that participate in it is the way in which we provide value from the solutions we create. As a result of tremendous innovation, low cost availability of massive compute power, and the low cost of storage and bandwidth, we can create solutions that were previously inconceivable. Solutions that help businesses make decisions based on what will happen in the future, not just based on what happened in the past. It is my belief that the businesses that are most committed to effectively using data assets and the tools to extract insight from them will either become or remain the leaders in their industries. Those that do not will find themselves lost in a haze of non-competitiveness.

Smarter planets or smarter computers? Who cares. This isn’t politics or religion. Everyone agrees this sea change will happen. This industry is energized to innovate and create solutions that have never before been possible and corporations are finding extraordinary value from this new wave of analytics. All this attention on analytics is great for Netezza. As the giants add more capability to their systems, they will become complex, burdensome, and a drain on the very mission they are intended to perform. But not from Netezza. We focus our efforts on building the infrastructure to support the new world of data and analytics. Infrastructure that is high-performance and easy to deploy and use, allowing our customers to focus their attention on what really matters, running their businesses.