Netezza CEO is driven to think big

What if all of the other players from your Little League team wound up being enshrined at Cooperstown, or all of the kids from your English class went on to win Nobel Prizes?

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Jit Saxena, the CEO of Framingham-based Netezza Corp., isn't in that position precisely. But many of Saxena's colleagues from his days at Data General, the minicomputer maker that was featured in the book ''Soul of a New Machine," have assumed major roles in the tech sector.

Two of them, Ray Ozzie and Craig Mundie, are now chief technology officers at Microsoft. David Mahoney founded Banyan Systems, and Bill Foster founded Stratus Computers. Mark Leslie was CEO of Veritas Software (now being acquired by Symantec), and Tom Mendoza is now president of Network Appliance, a billion-dollar data storage company in Silicon Valley with 3,200 employees.

''Jit's counterparts at Data General have gone on to do great things," says David Skok of Matrix Partners, one of the venture capital firms that has invested a total of $68 million in Netezza. Skok adds that another Data General alumnus, Ed Zander, is now chief executive of Motorola. ''That helps you to think big, and not want to spend your time on little things," he says.

Saxena certainly isn't thinking small. His ambition with Netezza is to ''build the kind of company we used to have here on the East Coast" -- a big, influential, stand-alone technology company. Already, Netezza, founded in 2000, is approaching $100 million in annual revenue, and there's buzz about an imminent IPO filing. But building an independent tech firm at a time when all's silent on the IPO front and small companies are getting snapped up by acquirers will be hard.

Netezza makes what it calls ''data warehouse appliances" -- rack-mounted repositories for information, festooned with red lights that blink to let you know everything's OK. Locally, customers like TJX and Epsilon use Netezza's machines to stash data that they want to be able to query regularly -- asking questions about customer trends or uncovering kinks in the supply chain, for instance. The appliances are designed expressly for data warehousing. By grafting chips directly to disk drives, the data and the horsepower required to analyze it are in the same place. There's less shuffling of bits from place to place (as there would be with an EMC storage system and a separate server), so database queries get finished faster. And Netezza's appliances are built using off-the-shelf components, which makes them cheap.

Faster and cheaper is the essence of Netezza's strategy. ''If you can only do 30 percent better than what's already out there, don't bother starting a company," says Saxena. He likes to say that Netezza's machines are 10 times faster than the competition -- that would be IBM, Oracle, and the Teradata division of NCR -- at less than half the price.   Continued...