On the other hand, it’s now almost a year later, and Exadata doesn’t seem to have set the world on fire …

a) almost all of the article is just hot air
b) hardware is hardware – fixed limitations
c) once it is exploited properly, software functionality is the differentiator (but most companies don’t know how to exploit hence the Teradata etc advantage)
d) ask me if you want an unbiased and professional opinion (but not if you are just trying to sell to your manager)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10042604-75.html

As for the two paying customers — since you’re so knowledgeable, would you care to name them?

Thanks,

CAM

The amount of funding received by DATAllegro is public knowledge, $62 Million over 5 years

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/07/what_the_micros.html

The customer count comes from interviews with current and former sales people. Notice the qualifiers “paying, and production” $62 million can buy a few customers that do not have budgeted projects. They also had the habit of listing proofs of concepts as customers. But at the end of the day there are a total of two (2) companies that paid for the solution with a license agreement and are currently using the solution in production…….. take it to the bank

Where did you get those figures?

CAM

Thanks for the ‘compliment’. “Ice cubes to Eskimos” – not the most original and certainly not the most insulting thing that’s been said about me online.

I don’t usually respond to anonymous posts, but thought I’d make an exception in this case because you are really doing a disservice to the great people here. For someone who’s not here to bad mouth DATAllegro, you sure don’t have much that’s positive to say!

Despite your claims to the contrary, we actually only had one system returned since the company started. Like most startups, we went through a period where the product suffered from some early stage growing pains. This was mostly due to HW reliability when we were building our own servers. We fixed that by going to standard servers and storage, which gave our engineers more time to focus on software improvements and overall quality. Most of our customers stuck with us and are now having great success on the v3 platform. Shame you guys didn’t, but I’m glad to hear your project was a success in the end.

So, whatever you may think of me (and I’m not sure what I did to incur your wrath), the fact is that DATAllegro has some of the largest, most successful DW installations in the world running on its technology and that’s something the team here is justly proud of. I’m certainly very proud of what they and our customers have achieved together. I’m also very pleased that Microsoft (after extensive due diligence ) has recognized our achievements and wants us to help take SQL Server to the next level in the DW space.

Finally, it’s funny that you think Curt has “fallen for my game” (whatever that is). He’s consistently been the most insightful analyst I’ve spoken to and has often given me a hard time on both technical and business topics. There’s plenty of evidence of this in his various blogs, if you care to read them.

Stuart Frost
CEO, DATAllegro

I’ve said plenty of unfavorable things about DATAllegro right here in this blog. You shouldn’t have far to look for them.

@Mark,

So far as I can tell, data warehouses are getting larger somewhat faster than Moore’s Law + software improvements are raising the upper end for Oracle and SQL Server. Thus, the universe of customers whose needs can’t be addressed by Oracle or plain Microsoft SQL Server is likely to grow, not shrink.

CAM