Netezza Rolls Out Skimmer Data Warehouse Appliance

According to Phil Francisco, Netezza vice president of product marketing and product management, Skimmer is based on the same infrastructure that Netezza uses in its recently launched Twinfin data warehouse servers in a smaller footprint. That smaller packaging, he said should not only extend the appeal of Netzza technology into the small-to-medium business market, but also be of interest to software vendors looking to bundle a data warehouse platform alongside their applications. For example, Kalido, a provider of an information system, will be using Skimmer to deliver an appliance on which its software comes bundled.

Francisco said businesses of all sizes are now under pressure to back up assumptions with real analytics, but most of them can’t afford high-end data warehousing platforms. With the release of TwinFin, Netezza has been taking the cost out of data warehouse servers by eliminating all the proprietary hardware frequently associated with this category, said Francisco.

Netezza, as part of the effort to get business intelligence applications running in real-time, is locked in a battle with Oracle, Teradata, Microsoft and a variety of other smaller startup companies that are trying to take data warehouse appliances mainstream.