Greenplum customer notes
In a briefing about a forthcoming product announcement, Greenplum threw in a slide saying:
- Greenplum is getting 12-15 new (paying) customers per quarter, all of whom it fondly refers to as “Tier 1” enterprises.
- Greenplum will hit the 100+ customer mark this quarter (thus joining Vertica and Infobright).
- <10% of Greenplum business is now “influenced” by Sun hardware.
I asked Ben Werther to unpack that last claim for me. He quickly noted that it wasn’t his slide, but rather had been put together by colleagues. That said:
- As of the past quarter or two, <10% of Greenplum’s sales activity is on Sun, which works out to maybe one sale per quarter and at most a small number of sales cycles. (That’s down from from 50%+ not that long ago.)
- Most Greenplum business is now on HP or Dell equipment. Some is on IBM. There are some interesting sales cycles on Cisco’s new UCS (Unified Computing System) blades, but no closed deals yet. EMC seems to be part of the Cisco story.
No doubt part of the reason for the move away from Sun equipment is the impending Oracle acquisition. Another may be that the Greenplum/Sun appliance is somewhat underpowered. E.g., without particularly high levels of compression, eBay puts over 60 terabytes of data on each Greenplum node, which probably isn’t ideal from the standpoint of query performance.
Greenplum also says that 50% or so of sales are subscription-priced, rather than perpetual-licensed. I don’t have a sense for how long that’s been going on. (Edit: Ben Werther tells me this has been true for over a year.)
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