"Don't be afraid to try the greatest sport around
(catch a wave, catch a wave)
Everybody tries it once
Those who don't just have to put it down
You paddle out turn around and raise
And baby that's all there is to the coastline craze
You gotta catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world"
– from "Catch a Wave" by The Beach Boys (1963)
Surf's up! Summer seems to finally have arrived in the Boston area and a number of vendors in the data warehousing and analytics space are hoping to catch a wave riding on a flurry of industry announcements. A few trends continue to build in the news:
- Data sizes continue to grow alongside the pressure to increase performance & shrink data latencies;
- Workload complexity and user counts continue to grow;
- More and more, customers are seeing the value of running advanced analytical processing directly in their primary data repository (see item #1 for reasons why); and
- Industry prices for data warehousing and analytics have begun another shift downward.
Today I'd like to address this last point. According to more than one industry analyst, over the last several years, Netezza has served as "the benchmark" for DWA pricing in the industry. Several of our competitors have sought to match and/or undercut Netezza pricing in the market. Some of the incumbent players have tried to, with very limited success, hinge their pricing off Netezza prices, match the performance of the Netezza Performance Server® system, or inoculate their pricey "flagship" products by adding less-expensive, feature-deficient products to their portfolio. But Netezza has continued to succeed in the marketplace, becoming a profitable, publicly-traded company with nearly 300 customers and 400 employees worldwide and one that is listed among the "Leaders" in the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
When we disrupted the data warehousing market with our first generation product in 2003 and 2004, Netezza was one of very few startups in an otherwise moribund industry. Now, with established "street cred" and hundreds of loyal customers, we intend to once again upset our competitors and lead the market in pivoting to a new competitive price-performance level. We're about to launch the fourth generation platform of our data warehouse and analytic appliances, which will advance Netezza's performance leadership and once again establish a new price-performance benchmark.
Admittedly, we won't be the first vendor offering high-performance data warehouse systems to move to a lower pricing plateau. That task is usually done by early-stage start-ups looking to find a way to differentiate themselves. True to form, Dataupia probably can claim establishing a lower price point first and recently another multiyear "start-up" has also started lower. But those are offerings from very modestly-sized startups with no established market "track record". Netezza will be the first company with proven product maturity, customer base and financial viability to do so.
Just how and what are we doing to cause this disruption? Well, let's just say things around the "briefing table" have been quite hectic, and that I and others will have more news about that to follow shortly.
[As you might imagine, it's been getting more and more difficult to keep things under wraps – in recent weeks we've even had to fight people off from getting early "sneak peeks". 
]
Until then hey, it's summertime! So here's what I'd recommend –
"So take a lesson from a top-notch surfer boy
(catch a wave, catch a wave)
Get yourself a big board
But don't you treat it like a toy
Just get away from the shady turf
And baby go catch some rays on the sunny surf
And when you catch a wave you'll be sittin' on top of the world
Catch a wave and you'll be sittin' on top of the world"
Twin Fin: A short board (usually 5'8" - 6'8") with a wide tail for maneuverability and a fin near each rail for stability in radical turns.
Purpose: A wider tail area provides more planing area and lift, which creates more speed by efficiently utilizing wave energy. Milking speed and energy from smart surf with extremely sensitive and responsive turning ability are this design's strong points
