Everybody talks about having a partner ecosystem, but usually that’s just marketing speak for the typical us-and-them model of partner programs. One of my goals since taking over leadership of the Netezza Developer Network has been to encourage more peer-to-peer interaction among Netezza partners. We offer a lot of benefits to individual partners via our partner programs such as the NDN, but I’ve often wondered what sort of innovation might happen if we dumped the traditional hub-and-spoke partnering mindset and found a way of managing a partner program more like a small world network. Sure, at Netezza’s annual user conference we get our partners together in the conference hall for networking, but the real question is what happens during the rest of the year.

I just had a meeting that challenged my thoughts and proved that there are some really interesting initiatives bubbling up from our partner community. I had a meeting scheduled with one of our key NDN partners (Fuzzy Logix- http://www.fuzzyl.com) to review the latest and greatest advanced analytics functions that they’ve been developing in OnStream. Fuzzy Logix often pushes the envelope with the Netezza platform, so I was looking forward to seeing some neat stuff. I stepped into the meeting and noticed that there was a new guy in the room who turned out to be John Madalon of Aperity (https://www.aperity.com). Aperity is another Netezza partner who offers a hosted brand management solution for CPG. It’s not an OnStream application that falls under NDN, but it does run on Netezza as a complementary technology.

It turns out that Aperity and Fuzzy Logix have partnered to extend Aperity’s brand management solution with Fuzzy Logix’s OnStream-enabled technology for forecasting. The demo they walked me through was focused on the beverages industry. By embedding the forecasting analytics in-database, they were able to calculate extremely accurate (north of 95%) forecasts on the fly based on very granular, high volume historical data. I was surprised by what I saw—it was a cutting edge application of Netezza’s OnStream technology, and it happened without any direct technical support from Netezza. The Aperity / Fuzzy Logix product partnership is exactly the sort of direct peer-to-peer collaboration that we want to see come from the NDN. I was also very intrigued by the forecasting technology implemented by Fuzzy Logix. When I asked what it was, the answer I got from Partha Sen (CEO of Fuzzy Logix) was a smile and, “You’ll see…”. Normally when people are coy it means that something is up, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some additional product announcements coming out of Aperity and Fuzzy Logix in the coming months.

So… rest assured that good things are bubbling up from Netezza’s partner ecosystem…