Crossing the Line

Happy Belated Birthday Oracle Exadata (aka Database Machine)

tyoung — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:43:41 GMT

The sky did not fall in for Netezza as Oracle predicted. Instead, we've gone from strength to strength. TwinFin extends our lead and at our current run rate, TwinFin customers will soon outnumber Exadata’s. My sense is that Oracle has fewer than 25 Exadata installations although I suspect many of these are not paid-for customers in the strict "hand over the money" sense of the word. For a company with the inside track on over 250,000 customers, 25 installations in a year is hardly stellar success -- it's what a statistician may call a "rounding error." This is also low when you consider that in the same time period over twice this number of Oracle customers churned to Netezza, presumably pausing to consider Exadata on their way.

Oracle's challenge is greater than people imagine: their portability advantage is now their Achilles’ heal. Portability across different hardware systems -- Oracle's first killer app -- is a hindrance in the appliance model whose advantage lies in very specific software designed for a specific hardware configuration. For Oracle, generalization means that all the baggage that comes with an Oracle database for performance tuning and data management -- such as results caching, buffers, indexing, partitioning, tablespaces (ie the stuff you don’t need in Netezza) — is standard in Exadata. This increases costs, slows throughput and makes for the very same unwieldy solution people are trying to escape.

Oracle is responding to Netezza (and Teradata) in the same way that the incumbent database vendors responded to Oracle in the 1980s: they are bolting-on "me too" features to existing products and hoping their customers won't be tempted by alternative solutions. Cullinet's IDMS/R is a great example. It was their attempt to be seen to embrace the relational model by adding relational features to their CODASYL database. But history shows no one was convinced and it was too little too late. Another spanner jamming Oracle's works is that the value of thoroughbred appliances is so visible and easily realized, their "PL/SQL standardization" trump card is easily discredited: when the business suffers, there's not much to discuss!

So what does the coming year hold for Exadata? Well, a new hardware platform announcement sends Oracle back to the starting line. There's a switch in tone from 'the world’s fastest data warehouse that can do OLTP' (circa 2008) to 'the world’s fastest OLTP database that can do data warehousing." But regardless of anything else, a sure fire thing is Oracle will claim victory and performance leadership. The full-page ads are probably already commissioned.

A Piece of Plastic Worth its Weight in Gold

tyoung — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 17:46:18 GMT

Just when I thought I would stop moaning about Oracle, and avoid accusations of paranoia, I learned that back in my hometown of England, Oracle has been bragging about how since they announced Exadata, Netezza haven't closed a single deal. Apart from the fact that this simply isn't true, it's an odd claim for a vendor 100 times our size and one known for making bold claims. How about a bit of bragging about how many Exadata deals Oracle has closed? Isn't that the yardstick for success?

Oracle has been in the data management business some 25 years longer than Netezza. Based on understanding their own clients’ business strategies, Oracle has advised thousands of companies on their IT strategy and - in numerous cases - this advice has even been paid for. So any notion that Oracle didn't see the explosion of data and analytics looming on the horizon is ridiculous. Quite frankly, if Oracle had done their job properly, Netezza would have never existed in the first place!

So here's the crunch. Given Oracle is a trusted IT advisor with the inside track, reputation and relationship with tens of thousands of companies, Exadata's progress in the market since September 2008 has been appalling. And let's not forget that with 100 times the muscle of Netezza other benefits come to play -- like brand recognition, marketing and sales coverage, misleading ads in the Wall Street Journal, partner leverage and so on.

Rather than crowing about their success, they should be blushing with sheer embarrassment.

With such a poor track record, one can only conclude that Exadata can't be very good. Think about it: if a little start-up, like Dataupia or Greenplum, had released it no one would be taking it seriously. This suggests that the only thing of any value with this machine is the little plastic button on the front that says "Oracle"!

I'm still sleeping at night.

Oracle Exadata and the Phoney War

tyoung — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 21:38:19 GMT

We’ve received several calls recently from Oracle that sound like something from an episode of The Sopranos—all in jest I should add—the gist of which is that Oracle don’t like us poking fun at Exadata and we had better watch it! It’s hard to imagine that Oracle can bring any more attention to this issue than having Larry Ellison declare premature victory against Netezza during his keynote at Oracle OpenWorld last year.

The irony for me personally of all this, is that I cracked my marketing teeth at Oracle in the late eighties when Oracle was the upstart with the cool technology fighting the big ugly incumbents against all the odds. How the tables have turned! Oracle has grown all big and ugly, lost their innovative flair, rely on corporate muscle to get the job done and throw a tantrum when they don’t get their way.

Personally, I doubt whether Exadata will be ready for prime time for another 18 months yet. In the meantime, we have a phoney war on our hands: all talk and no action. I predict Oracle is trying hard to find an opportunity to announce that someone, somewhere is using this thing. At least that’s what the Dummies’ Guide to Blasé Big-Company Corporate Marketing advocates. The HP Neoview team—having been clearly sidelined from this arrangement with Oracle—is also yet to buck up the courage and admit there is no synergy with Oracle here.

In the meantime, while Oracle and Netezza throw their handbags at each other, innovative companies looking to solve today’s analytic problems will continue to buy from Netezza (and sometimes from our competitors!) leaving laggards, already bogged down in the recessionary mire, to worry about Exadata in the name of their corporate standardization initiatives and performance "incrementalism".

Batten Down the Hatches

tyoung — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 02:20:09 GMT

Watching my modest investments dissipate is a sure sign of a recession. Another sign is being continuously harassed by telemarketing calls from vendors with “recession proof” offerings. This has now reached such a fever pitch that, if these vendors are to be believed, they must be delighting in the economic downturn! For me, it’s a case of hear the word recession and tune out. So note self: make sure Netezza doesn’t jump on the recession bandwagon.

As Netezza’s “spin doctor in chief”, I have the task of fathoming out a good recession story of our own. Fortunately, the answer is pretty straightforward: just continue to do what we’ve always done (“yuk” I hear you scream as you reach for a bucket).

In times of economic strife, corporate executives batten down the hatches and get back to basics—they watch expenses and kill strategic programs that have only long term value, they focus on quality and execute tactically on programs with a rapid ROI and immediate results. And when they’re not doing this, they look for market openings where they can step-in and make a killing.

Data warehouse appliances provide a quick and easy solution to a business problem without all the fuss that we’ve come so accustomed to in IT projects. Of Netezza’s hundreds of customers, we are proud to rank among their number some very successful EDW implementations, but a great number of enzees deploy Netezza to solve pressing business problems and then grow from there increasing business value (and IT credibility) at each step of the way.

So whether it’s dealing with huge amounts of data in revenue assurance, doing deep-dive analytics in fraud detection or just sorting out SLA breaches in business intelligence… Netezza data warehouse appliances go in easily, are quick to deploy, perform blisteringly fast and are as cheap as chips are about as recession proof as you can get.

So, note to self: don’t mess with something that’s working.