Common wisdom says that data-warehouse projects are complex, expensive, and can have failure rates as high as 90%. But Jit Saxena doesn't believe it has to be that way.

Saxena is co-founder and CEO of Netezza Corp., a startup that has developed what's best described as a preassembled data-warehouse appliance capable of tackling terabyte-scale business-intelligence applications at a lower cost than today's assemble-yourself data warehouses.

"The next phase of computing will be built around harnessing huge amounts of data and getting value out of it," Saxena says. "How this data is used for competitive advantage will determine how effective a business will be."

The idea of a preassembled data warehouse first came to Foster Hinshaw, a former consultant and now Netezza's chief technology officer. Hinshaw and Saxena founded Netezza in September 2000.

Born in Bina, India, in 1945, Saxena watched his three older brothers become doctors like their father. But he wanted to do something different. After graduating from St. John's College in Agra and the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, Saxena moved to the United States and earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at Michigan State University in 1968.

Six months ago, Vibrant Solutions, a provider of software and services to telecom companies, installed a Netezza system on a trial basis. The upshot: It performed in three minutes data-analysis tasks that take up to eight hours with Vibrant's other data warehouses. Says Rick Mahuson, Vibrant's chief technology officer, "It dramatically changes the data-analysis paradigm."
--Rick Whiting