by Vishal Daga - Netezza, Director of Partner Marketing

"Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air." - Jack Benny, comedian, author and actor (1894-1974)

There are a few partner user conferences and groups coming up, which prompted me to reflect on ones we had attended at the end of 2006. Netezza participated in the Business Objects and SPSS annual user conferences and both of these events were quite successful - they sparked conversations and fostered introductions. Events like these are really beneficial because they provide a forum that lets us build greater awareness within our partner communities. Ultimately, this results in the development of stronger alliances and accelerates the development of more compelling joint value propositions that leverage the performance and/or simplicity of Netezza in new ways. I have provided some highlights from these events below:

• Business Objects Insight Americas 2006: We had one of our appliances at this event and were able to showcase a concept solution that demonstrated what an integrated BI solution could look like. The particular solution we demoed packaged Business Objects Reporting and Analysis Applications along with Netezza's data warehouse appliance and delivered in one system a pre-integrated complete BI environment that was capable of addressing the needs of many mid-market customers. In addition, Durgesh Das, BI Manager at CompuCredit also presented a compelling case study as to why his organization selected Netezza. Durgesh touched on many user anecdotes around performance improvements and administrative simplicity that highlight the real impact of Netezza.

  The links below lead to video vignettes of CompuCredit users in different roles - Business Analyst, DBAs, IT managers - talking about the value of Netezza from their individual perspectives. Pretty compelling stuff! Patrick Fallon, Project Manager, discusses how CompuCredit has seen an exponential increase in processing reports and queries with Netezza. According to Jon Damazo, Business Analyst, life before Netezza was "slow, very slow." With Netezza, it is so much easier for them to do iterative analysis and accomplish more. Blake Sanders, Associate Director of Development, saw CompuCredit's user base growing by 200-250% but their infrastructure wasn't going to be able to handle this level of analytics. By putting Business Objects on Netezza, they're able to drive adoption of user activity because the performance is so fast. For Richard Helms, Sr. DBA, Netezza was incredibly easy to implement, and maintenance is "hands free."

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

• SPSS Directions 2006: According to many, the next big thing in BI will be around data mining and predictive analytics - not just reporting on data but actually using historical data to predict what will happen in the future. Clementine, SPSS's data mining product, delivers optimized connectivity to Netezza today, so Clementine customers can really take advantage of Netezza's performance to tackle their predictive analytic needs. We had many engaging conversations with both Netezza and SPSS customers at this event who were looking to develop/deploy deeper more effective predictive analytic capabilities. Netezza and SPSS continue to work closely together to develop tighter integration capabilities that will help to put a new level of predictive analytic capabilities in the reach of enterprise organizations.

On to the next ones!

Vishal Daga