We’ve been working for quite a long time on our Bizgres MPP database product and we’re super happy with how things are going so far, Yara told Computer Business Review in a recent interview.
Yara said that Greenplum was benefiting from the work that data warehouse appliance vendors like Netezza Corp have already done in evangelizing alternative approaches to traditional, and expensive, enterprise data warehousing.
We’re actively marketing [MPP] as an open source solution. That’s one of the reasons why we’re getting interest. People don’t see us as just another data warehousing software firm.
San Mateo, California-Greenplum is trying to craft a viable business around the Bizgres open source project that is working to evolve the PostgreSQL database into a scalable platform for enterprise-class data warehousing.
Bizgres MPP, released in February this year, is a commercially licensed, massively parallel processing database for storing and analyzing data.
The system is built on commodity (that is, low cost) clusters of servers that extend the capabilities of the PostgreSQL database system. MPP is based on a shared-nothing architecture that efficiently breaks up data processing across distributed servers – in effect moving the nodes close to the data to provide high-performance, parallel analysis.
While many companies might still be getting to grips with the open source model, Greenplum is starting to carve an early niche for itself among Internet firms that already have experience of implementing open source web, application and database servers
These companies are familiar using open source technologies and have already built entire infrastructures on [open source] building blocks. If you look closely at the genesis of the Internet, it’s built mainly on open source standards and LAMP-stacks.
However Yara admitted there are some conservative sectors that will not look at open source technology so keenly.
Positioning is also key according to Yara, who said that Greenplum’s sweet spot remains the one terabyte-plus market.
Our initial focus is on departmental applications. We’re not getting customers to turn off their big enterprise data warehousing system.
We feel there’s still plenty of green field opportunity in this area once you bring the cost of data warehousing down. We’ll continue to push in this direction.
Yara noted that many of Greenplum’s rivals, notably Netezza and Datallegro Inc, are getting more aggressive lately and are setting their sights at the high-end.
He warned this would pitch them directly against data warehousing giants like NCR Teradata Corp, Oracle Corp and IBM Corp.
Yara certainly seems content with Greenplum’s progress so far despite a recent hiccup. Things did not look so bright for the company at the end of last year when it’s CEO suddenly left and the company effectively restructured its distributed sales force, effectively consolidating them at the company’s Californian headquarters.
Looking ahead this year, Yara said a dot release of Bizgres MPP is due out at the end of June. This will include enhancements for SQL support, administration functions and further performance improvements.
Yara said that a more substantial 3.0 release is a couple of quarters away at least. However he declined to comment on the specifics of this release.
The company is also looking to expand its partner network. Yara said that because Bizgres MPP is a software-only product it opens up wider partnership opportunities that data warehouse appliance vendors that bundle in hardware as part of their products.
Our focus is on being a software company and we intend to build business in conjunction with partners. Appliance-based products are more disruptive and generally don’t really sit well with relational database, hardware and storage vendors, he said. For example, HP and Dell don’t like it when Netezza wins business.
Yara expects to announce a slew of new partnerships with hardware platform providers and ISVs including business intelligence software firms later this year.
BI tools can easily connect to our system since we support standard database drivers and ODBC. Many of our customers are doing that today.
Ultimately the success of Bizgres MPP will be judged on the customer and sales traction it gets in the market. Yet like all new data warehousing start-ups, Greenplum remains coy about disclosing how many customers it has.
To date the company has publicly announced only three referenceable customers for its MPP offering – O’Reilly Media, InterSearch and Frontier Airlines. But its claims to have more.
Some of Greenplum’s data warehousing rivals predictably give a mixed reaction to the company’s chances of success.
Greenplum should have a chance in principle. There’re lots of room for open source BI plays, said Robert Thompson, vice president of marketing at data warehousing appliance start-up Paraccel Inc.
But at the high end? I don’t know if that’s where [a company] would trust an open source company?
Meanwhile Stuart Frost, CEO of Datallegro which another customer-coy data warehousing appliance firm, claims he had never seen Greenplum in a competitive position.
I don’t think they are a credible player.
Yara is disappointed by the negative commentary and banter between data warehousing appliance vendors and prefers to stay above the fray.
I believe we’re all playing in a potentially large growth market and there’s lots of database innovation going on.
