For any accountants in the audience (or anyone else strange enough to enjoy reading financial statements…), you will know that Netezza’s fiscal year begins on February 1. Setting aside the quirks of history that made it so, this shifted Netezza New Year gives us a second chance to consider the year ahead, without all the pressures of turkey hangovers and soon-to-be-broken New Year’s resolutions in mind.
As a part of our new fiscal year planning, I just had the pleasure to attend Netezza’s annual customer team kick-off meeting. At the beginning of every year, all of Netezza’s customer-facing employees gather to discuss what made us successful in the prior year, and what we can do to serve our customers better in the year to come. At the same time, it’s an opportunity for us to educate each other on all of the partner activities happening out in the field.
This year, one of the main initiatives discussed was to focus additional efforts on the core commercial industries that have shown the greatest adoption of Netezza technology:
· Telecommunications
· Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods
· Financial Services
· Health & Life Sciences
· Digital Media
From a partnership perspective, this means that in 2009 the Netezza Strategic Development team will be engaging with current partners and recruiting new partners in each of these areas. Our objective is to create a growing and vibrant ecosystem of partners who can help us to deliver complete business solutions and even greater value to our customers. By the end of 2009, you can expect an even greater number of applications will be available on the Netezza platform in these target industries.
While I was attending the team session on Retail & Consumer Packaged Goods, I was impressed by one partner who I think is as an excellent example of the way that Netezza can engage, support, and elevate partners via our existing programs. Howard Cohn of EYC (http://www.eyc.com) described how EYC’s analysis software for customer loyalty card databases, combined with Netezza’s data warehouse appliance, has enabled customers to get better answers faster while working with even more comprehensive data sets.
With the support of Netezza’s technology, industry, and partner sales teams, EYC has successfully ported several of its applications to the NPS platform. Together, EYC’s and Netezza’s customer teams are promoting this joint solution to the retail industry. To enable even more compelling performance, the teams are now considering embedding some of EYC’s key analytics into the database itself using Netezza’s OnStream development platform and the supporting resources available through the Netezza Developer Network.
EYC’s progression from partnership concept through to market launch and product enhancement is a great example of the full partnership lifecycle that we support. EYC is just one example of many partners who have successfully engaged with Netezza, and a growing number of these are enhancing their applications with Netezza’s in-database OnStream capabilities. For a list of partners with OnStream applications already on the market, you can see an application listing at http://www.netezza.com/data-warehouse-appliance-products/data-warehouse-applications.aspx.
I expect that 2009 will see a number of partners take OnStream applications to market in each of the vertical industries that we’re focusing on. If you see any application needs in your industry, want to recommend a vendor for Netezza partnership, or are a vendor with a concept for an OnStream or vertical industry solution based on Netezza, we’d love to hear from you.
