Enter Netezza Corp., a Framingham, Mass.-based startup. Founded in 2000, the company aims to bring real-time business intelligence applications to large, terabyte-sized databases. The Netezza Performance Server (NPS) series of products supports ad hoc and complex queries of large databases through standard interfaces such as SQL, ODBC and JDBC. By combining the processing power of symmetrical multiprocessing and the scalability of massively parallel processing, Netezza says its products run queries 10-to-20 times faster than those of existing technology, at half the price. The grounds for such an impressive claim? Ellen Rubin, Netezza's director of marketing, says that the NPS products integrate software, storage and server technologies in a single machine, replacing the hodgepodge of configurations that currently exist. "The NPS is an integrated appliance and that's what differentiates it," she says. "Companies can use their legacy BI tools, including Business Objects and SAS, that sit on the NPS box. We run queries fast because all the pieces are optimized to work as one."

It would be natural to chalk up Rubin's comments as typical marketing hyperbole, but analysts and customers are singing the same tune. "Netezza's products are the fastest with some blindingly staggering numbers," says Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, Mass. "The market leader right now is Teradata; on average, real-live users of Netezza's products are running queries 5 to 10 times faster than Teradata at a quarter of the price." Netezza's integrated design offers a nice way to tackle the problem of searching large databases, Duplessie adds. The typical way of doing queries involves letting an application sift through a database, read everything in that database, manipulate it and create an output. "With 10 gigabytes of data that's okay, but with 10 terabytes of data, you might as well go home for a week," he says. By offloading and distributing the input and output from the application or database server to the disk drive, Netezza's products search through data on the host side, and thus can query large databases much faster.

Mike Coakley is the vice president of marketing technology products at Epsilon, a customer relationship marketing company in Wakefield, Mass. An early beta site, Epsilon went into production with NPS this spring. "We had initial discussions with Netezza over a year ago, and we thought their promises were too good to be true," he says. It turns out that Netezza's 10-to-20 times performance improvement was conservative. "We have experienced performance that is 8-to-80 times faster depending on the query," Coakley says. For most of its clients, Epsilon builds and hosts systems for campaign management, datamining and business intelligence applications; Coakley sees a need for Netezza's high-performance technology. "We think it's going to be a great fit for databases on the larger side," he says.

With such glowing reactions from the analyst and customer ranks, Netezza's future looks bright, but it's not guaranteed. "The market is getting bigger and Netezza's technology looks good, but the company still has to execute," Duplessie says. Netezza is a small player in a market dominated by Teradata, a division of NCR. Price tags for NPS products start at more than $600,000, and potential customers may balk at spending that kind of money with a startup. Yet in Netezza's favor is its association with experienced IT industry veterans. Co-founder and CEO Jit Saxena was a founder and former CEO at Applix, a maker of analytical CRM products, and board member Ed Zander was formerly president and COO of Sun.

-Megan Santosus