The Marlow-UK based company said its new licensing schemes for version 6.0 of its WX2 system gives customers the flexibility to appropriately right size their analytic deployments and pay for analysis time on an on-demand way based on usage. The licensing model is analogous to that of a mobile phone pay-as-you-go mobile phone plan, with the added benefit of rollover minutes every month.
Under the new licensing scheme, a customer that purchases a 20-terbyte WX2 system has the freedom to split the deployment across different geographical data centers and platforms. For example, a 10-terabyte system in London and another 10-terabyte system in New York can each run on and support different platforms and applications.
The granularity introduced by commodity hardware and massively parallel processing performance means the analytic system can also be flexed across on-demand and utility environments. This will enable customers to buy CPU processing hours from utility computing providers, and use them whenever they want.
Unlike other utility computing agreements that round up processing times by the hour, Kognitio’s is more dynamic and granular, down to a 10-minute slot. It also lets customers analyze a single terabyte of data over an hour, but spread over several weeks. A good example of this flexibility is Cambridge University’s implementation of a huge astronomical data warehouse. Data is hosted by HP’s Flexible Computing Division in Houston Texas and the University buys CPU time by the hour.
Pricing for WX2 version 6 depends on the scale of the deployment. A one-terabyte system starts at $132,118 (GBP69,000) but drops to $36,390 (GBP19,000) per usable terabyte for a 50-terabyte system. Support for concurrent users is factored into the pricing.
Roger Gaskell, who heads up engineering development at Kognitio, said customer demand promoted the new licensing scheme, said the company has recently been fielding more and more requests for service-based provisions for its WX2 system, which is aimed at complex data analytics.
Kognitio CEO Roger Llewellyn likened the new licensing model to buying kilowatt hours for electricity and believes this flexibility is particularly well suited for service providers to deploy on-demand analytics to their customers. Data warehouse appliances come with high initial implementation and running costs for data warehouse appliances, he said. WX2 changes that by offering more flexibility of price, performance, flexibility and geographic distribution.
The types of partners that Kognitio has its eye on include Alphameric, which provides hosted analytics services to small retailers, and DigiPoS, a supplier of point-of-sale hardware systems and terminals that is now looking to analyze data handled by its tills and terminals.
Importantly WX2 gives these service providers have the capability to scale the size of WX2 systems up or down for customers virtually without any added complexity of data loading or rebuilding of indexes. The key is the use of commodity blade technology to partition terabytes of data across server platforms.
We can start with a terabyte per blade across ten blades and flex to a terabyte and a half in 15 minutes. The WX2 database can also be reconfigured according to changing projects or geographies, said Sean Jackson, marketing director at Kognitio.
The WX2 platform was originally developed by British firm WhiteCross Systems Ltd. Initially it was sold as a hardware analytic system to service complex analytic needs. Expensive and proprietary, WX2 nevertheless quickly found a niche in the UK telco sector.
Over the years, WX2’s architecture evolved closer to a blade-server system, significantly more or less at the same time that blade servers became a commodity items. It also coincided with WhiteCross’s acquisition by Kognitio in August 2005.
Most of Kognitio’s WX2 business today comes from Europe. The UK is the company’s strongest market, generating about $30.6m of revenue last year. But Llewellyn hopes to establish a much bigger presence in North America early next year. [WX2] Version 6 provides us with good channel partnership opportunities with US utility computing providers like IBM and HP, he said.
WX2 currently has about 15 customers including BT, NTL, Lloyds TSB, and Scottish Power.
