Breakthrough: Exadata now has as many reference accounts as Aster Data!
According to Bob Evans of Information Week, there now are 15 disclosed Exadata reference accounts. Coincidentally, there are exactly 15 logos on Aster Data’s customer page. So on it own, that’s not a particularly impressive piece of information.
But other highlights of his column include:
- Some of those accounts are rather big-name. However, I’m not at all sure whether they’re actual production references.
- Andy Mendelsohn characterizes the sweet spot of Exadata’s market as “virtual private cloud.” That matches what Juan Loaiza told me six months ago.
- Oracle claims numerous competitive wins for Exadata. Let me hasten to note that one vendor’s “competitive win” is another vendor’s “our salesman read the deal as an unfavorable one and chose not to compete,” or even sometimes “Huh? We never heard about that deal.” That said, what I’m hearing is that Exadata is indeed a much stronger competitor than it used to be.
- Oracle claims a near $1 billion sales run rate for Exadata. No doubt, a large majority of those are hardware upgrades for existing Oracle database customers, often from non-Sun/Oracle hardware. Even so, some of those are surely deals that would have migrated away from Oracle in the pre-Exadata past.
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share, Oracle | 1 Comment |
More on Greenplum and EMC
I talked with Ben Werther of Greenplum for about 40 minutes, which was my first post-merger Greenplum/EMC briefing. “Historical” highlights include:
- Ben says Greenplum wasn’t being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum’s deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.
- However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another …
- Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.
- A typical “small” paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.
- Greenplum Chorus isn’t generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won’t be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.
Highlights looking forward include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Market share | 6 Comments |
Riptano, and Cassandra adoption
Tonight’s Cassandra technology post got plenty long enough on its own, so I’m separating out business and adoption issues here. For starters, known Cassandra users include:
- Facebook, which has said it has 150 or so Cassandra nodes (but see below)
- Twitter, which has said it has 45 or so Cassandra nodes
- Rackspace, which used to be Jonathan Ellis’ employer, and now is backing Cassandra company Riptano
- Digg, which along with Twitter and Rackspace was one of the three major users helping advance the Cassandra project
- OpenX, Simple Geo, Digital Reasoning, who Jonathan cited as production users in March
- Cloudkick, as noted and linked in my other post
- Two customers Riptano named at launch (but I’ve forgotten who they were*)
Fetlife, Meebo, and others seem to at least have a healthy interest in Cassandra, based on their level of involvement in a forthcoming Cassandra Summit. That said, the @Fetlife tweetstream features numerous yelps of pain, and I don’t mean the recreational kind. Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, Facebook, Market share, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Pricing, Riptano, Specific users | 3 Comments |
Cloudera Enterprise and Hadoop evolution
I talked with Cloudera a couple of weeks ago in connection with the impending release of Cloudera Enterprise. I’d say: Read more
Kickfire update
A Kickfire competitor tipped me off that he got 3 Kickfire salesmen’s resumes in 24 hours. I ran this by Kickfire CEO Bruce Armstrong, who confirmed that Kickfire has had a layoff, but gave me no further details.
Bruce also told me that Kickfire is now up to 10 paying customers, and that there are repeat deals.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Kickfire, Market share | 3 Comments |
More on Sybase IQ, including Version 15.2
Back in March, Sybase was kind enough to give me permission to post a slide deck about Sybase IQ. Well, I’m finally getting around to doing so. Highlights include but are not limited to:
- Slide 2 has some market success figures and so on. (>3100 copies at >1800 users, >200 sales last year)
- Slides 6-11 give more detail on Sybase’s indexing and data access methods than I put into my recent technical basics of Sybase IQ post.
- Slide 16 reminds us that in-database data mining is quite competitive with what SAS has actually delivered with its DBMS partners, even if it doesn’t have the nice architectural approach of Aster or Netezza. (I.e., Sybase IQ’s more-than-SQL advanced analytics story relies on C++ UDFs — User Defined Functions — running in-process with the DBMS.) In particular, there’s a data mining/predictive analytics library — modeling and scoring both — licensed from a small third party.
- A number of the other later slides also have quite a bit of technical crunch. (More on some of those points below too.)
Sybase IQ may have a bit of a funky architecture (e.g., no MPP), but the age of the product and the substantial revenue it generates have allowed Sybase to put in a bunch of product features that newer vendors haven’t gotten around to yet.
More recently, Sybase volunteered permission for me to preannounce Sybase IQ Version 15.2 by a few days (it’s scheduled to come out this week). Read more
Vertica update
Last month, Vertica’s CEO Ralph Breslauer quit,* and Vertica made it sound like there would be a new CEO late in April. And indeed, as of April 29, there was. He’s a guy I’ve never heard of before named Chris Lynch, apparently quite the sales machine builder. The most substance I’ve found is a pair of Mass High Tech articles — the latter exceedingly typo-ridden — to the general effect that:
- Vertica plans to build a massive, world-conquering sales force.
- If Vertica dips back into negative cash flow to do that and has to raise more venture capital, so be it.
- “Triple-digit” revenue growth is expected for this year.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Games and virtual worlds, Market share, Specific users, Vertica Systems, Web analytics | 1 Comment |
Greenplum Chorus and Greenplum 4.0
Greenplum is making two product announcements this morning. Greenplum 4.0 is a revision of the core Greenplum database technology. In addition, Greenplum is announcing Greenplum Chorus, which is the first product release instantiating last year’s EDC (Enterprise Data Cloud) vision statement and marketing campaign.
Greenplum 4.0 highlights and related observations include: Read more
Notes on the evolution of OLTP database management systems
The past few years have seen a spate of startups in the analytic DBMS business. Netezza, Vertica, Greenplum, Aster Data and others are all reasonably prosperous, alongside older specialty product vendors Teradata and Sybase (the Sybase IQ part). OLTP (OnLine Transaction Processing) and general purpose DBMS startups, however, have not yet done as well, with such success as there has been (MySQL, Intersystems Cache’, solidDB’s exit, etc.) generally accruing to products that originated in the 20th Century.
Nonetheless, OLTP/general-purpose data management startup activity has recently picked up, targeting what I see as some very real opportunities and needs. So as a jumping-off point for further writing, I thought it might be interesting to collect a few observations about the market in one place. These include:
- Big-brand OLTP/general-purpose DBMS have more “stickiness” than analytic DBMS.
- By number, most of an enterprise’s OLTP/general-purpose databases are low-volume and low-value.
- Most interesting new OLTP/general-purpose data management products are either MySQL-based or NoSQL.
- It’s not yet clear whether MySQL will prevail over MySQL forks, or vice-versa, or whether they will co-exist.
- The era of silicon-centric relational DBMS is coming.
- The emphasis on scale-out and reducing the cost of joins spans the NoSQL and SQL-based worlds.
- Users’ instance on “free” could be a major problem for OLTP DBMS innovation.
I shall explain. Read more
Some business trends in the data warehouse market
In recent conversations with various analytic DBMS vendors, a fairly consistent picture has emerged.
- Business is strong. Multiple vendors claim to be going gangbusters, with the happy sounds coming out of Vertica and Infobright being echoed by several competitors. Hearsay suggests some other companies in related businesses are doing well too. Depending on who you talk to, the business pickup dates back to Q4, give or take a quarter.
- Oracle Exadata has become a formidable competitor, on the strength of Exadata 2. Exadata 2’s positioning and perception among Oracle users seem to be pretty much in line with what Oracle portrayed to me.
- Teradata is portrayed as a weak competitor. Competitors don’t worry about Teradata nearly as much as they do about Oracle. That said, I suspect a bit of wishful thinking; Teradata is clearly still getting a lot of business the other vendors would dearly love to have.
- HP Neoview is reeling. (Almost) nobody sees Neoview competitively. The Walmart Neoview installation is said to have stayed small at best. JP Morgan Chase is said to have completely thrown Neoview out (and a bunch of HP engineers with it).
- (Almost) nobody mentions competing against DB2 either. This continues to baffle me.