I suspect much of the problem lies in three areas. First, it’s very hard for independent observers to discover successful DATAllegro installations. You keep them a deep, dark secret, and third parties don’t happen to stumble across them much.

Second, I get the feeling competitors are feeling a little more heat from Sun and perhaps even HP than they are from your team.

Third, most of the market activity is at sites somewhat smaller than those where you’re highly competitive.

In response, I’d encourage you to disclose more customer information. I think you’ve reached the end of the line for secrecy in that regard, just as Netezza can’t really keep its product directions under wraps any more.

Best,

CAM

I’m a complete loss to understand why Greenplum is positioned better than us on the MQ. We clearly have a much stronger vision (scaling, encryption, grid, concurrency, etc.) and ability to execute on large installations. GP has their relationship with Sun, but that’s more than matched by our EMC, Dell and Bull relationships. Also, Sun has just announced a relationship with Paraccel, so where does that leave GP?

Gartner also commented that we are growing slower than our competitors. We recently announced growth of over 300% for last fiscal and that growth rate looks set to continue this fiscal. Netezza is around 60% and Teradata around 10%. I don’t know where GP is on this metric, but it’s hard to beleive they are seeing much more than 100% growth. Gartner was fully aware of all of these figures and still published the comment!

I also think we’re much closer to NZ than the MQ would indicate. In fact, I would say that we have a stronger vision, but it’s hard to argue that they aren’t ahead of us on ability to execute - just not as far as Gartner seems to think.

Oh well, hopefully next year’s MQ will be more in line with the way the rest of the market thinks.

Stuart
CEO DATAllegro

You’re absolutely right.

If Oracle could compete with us just by being installed on Dell servers and EMC storage, we would have a problem. The fact is they can’t. It’s going to take much more than a “reference architecture” to allow Oracle to scale and offer decent performance on more than 20TB.

Our solution is a true shared nothing MPP architecture that is much more similar to Teradata than Oracle (except that we’re much cheaper and a lot faster than TD). The hardware platform is irrelevant from that perspective.

Stuart Frost
CEO DATAllegro

Greenplum is MPP as well.

CAM

As for Greenplum, maybe it’s due to their Sun partnership. No idea beyond that.