"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship... the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth." – Peter Drucker (1909-2005), from Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 1985
Accelerating Innovation – Notes from the 2006 Netezza User Conference
This has been a big week for Netezza and the Netezza marketing team. We've just completed the 2nd Annual Netezza International User Conference at the Boston Seaport Hotel with 100% attendance growth over last year's conference. The company also had ten customer and/or partner press releases in the same period, spanning virtually all of our markets. Wednesday morning, Netezza CFO Pat Scannell told the audience at the closing session that the attendees included over 360 people, including customers, partners, analysts and prospects.
These attendees did, quite literally, represent a global audience for the event - coming in to participate in the event from Asia, Australia, Europe, Africa, and both North and South America (only 6-of-7 continents covered – there were no attendees from Antarctica that I know of), including 55 from Europe and Asia, alone.
The incredibly strong attendance demonstrated Netezza's dominant leadership in the Data Warehouse Appliance market, as I daresay no other vendor in or aspiring to this market category could have mounted even 1/3rd the level of participation. As Netezza President and COO, Jim Baum put things in his closing remarks of the User Conference Wednesday morning:bq. "We have always been focused on the Netezza community, but it's clear from what we've seen over the past year that there is a real change... something of a tipping point is happening here... There is something that is bigger than just Netezza that is changing the course of BI and Data Warehousing for the future... and you, our customers & partners, are leading the industry in that change."
In a "show of force" of their own, many of the UK participants (employees, customers, partners and prospects alike) had fun sporting customised "Netezza in the UK" tee shirts on opening day (Yeah, baby!). Jolly good. And the international dinner on Monday was, well, quite International - it was great to share the dinner table(s) in Boston's North End with people from Australia, Brasil, France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, UK, Spain and elsewhere.
As for the sessions themselves – in my admittedly-subjective view, the User Conference provided a mix of detailed technology & product information alongside numerous customer and partner business case studies. If anything, there was a request to provide more opportunities to view multiple sessions that spanned the four tracks of the conference. The 1-hour sessions included more than ten customer case studies, four partner case study sessions and seven technical sessions about the Netezza product and roadmap plans. And after the conference, through Friday, there were a number of follow-on training courses for customers, partners and employees.
A Few Great Quotes From the Plaza Ballroom Sessions
Monday Afternoon "Keynote"
"The target market for these portable pocket radios was teenagers, the rebar of humanity" – Professor Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business School
Tuesday Morning "Customer Panel"
"Is there anything that you can't do with Netezza today that you used to do?" – Mark Beyer, Research Director, Gartner
"We don't need to send big checks to 3rd party vendors anymore for DW consulting services." – Jagpal Jheeta, Business Systems Manager, Debenhams
Wednesday Morning "Partner Perspective"
"Data Mart versus Data Warehouse? That question is simply irrelevant" – Donald MacCormick, Vice President of Product Marketing, Business Objects
Opening Keynotes
The Opening Keynote addresses were delivered on Monday afternoon by Motorola Chairman and CEO Ed Zander as well as author & Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen (author of The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and Seeing What's Next Understand the job that the innovation will be hired to do* Allow competitors to flee, not fight by choosing an innovation entry path that may disrupt incumbents from below, but not directly attack them and* Identify who the right customers are by competing in a new market whose members' alternate choice might be non-consumption.Professor Christensen closed by saying that from what he understood of Netezza and its growing presence in the market, the company and our Data Warehouse Appliance could very-well be characterized as a "New Market Disruption".{size}
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Ed delivered the keynote with his typical high-energy panache and global view of the industry. He told the opening audience of well over 400 how excited he was for Netezza and its future. One of his missions at Motorola, he said, is to keep looking at disruptive technologies for his business. Using so-called "Whack Meetings", Ed encourages leaders at Motorola to whack their businesses before the competitors have a chance to. He told the crowd that Motorola's philosophy of accelerated innovation is based on a major disruptive shift, or "The Big Idea" (in Motorola's business, today that's 'seamless mobility').
Then Ed responded to questions from the audience for nearly 30 minutes – all the while as Motorola was finalizing its $3.9B acquisition of Symbol Technologies, Inc., his company's largest acquisition in nearly seven years. And shortly after his appearance on-stage with us, Ed had to be ready to hustle over for an interview on CNBC.
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Then Clayton Christensen came on-stage and with milk shake optimization as one of his use-cases, demonstrated that in order to enable a winning "New Market Disruption" strategy for introducing Disruptive Innovation to the market, his research had led him to three primary requirements:
Tuesday Keynote & Panel
On Tuesday, Netezza CEO Jit Saxena led off the morning with our vision of how "Netezza appliances position companies for the demands of tomorrow’s BI" and ushered in the morning's panel discussion before the swelling crowd in the large Plaza Ballroom. The panel was led by Gartner Research Director, Mark Beyer and included Kelly Carrigan, Senior Director of Database Architecture with Catalina Marketing, Jagpal Jheeta, Business Systems Manager of Debenhams, and Emory Heisler, Vice President of Information Technology Services, Healthcare Analytics Group with Wolters-Kluwer Health.
Jit's presentation went back to Netezza's founding principles and why those are still very much what matter today with the dynamically growing uses of data warehouse systems and especially data warehouse appliances being pushed by megatrends. "Netezza" he said, "has re-energized the data warehouse market and is the clear leader in the data warehouse appliance segment." Jit also stressed the importance of Community to Netezza – in terms of its 75 customers as well as partners, resellers and employees. And he gave a broadened vision for the future of data warehouse appliances that will deepen their impact, broaden their use cases and move appliances to the forefront as a competitive weapon for our customers to use.
Note: Watch for much more on these topics in this space in the weeks to come.
Mark opened this segment with a brief presentation on Gartner's perspective of Data Warehouse Trends - specifically noting the trends toward balanced disk-I/O-memory-processor systems, larger and more complex workloads of users and growing data volumes. He also discussed the importance of "high-value users" in increasing the value of the data warehouse and the dimensions of use & users that most data warehouses now experience. Then he turned to the panel members for their perspectives. Responding to questions from Mark and several more from the floor, Kelly, Jagpal and Emory recounted how large a difference the transition to the NPS data warehouse in their data warehouse operations had been – in terms of much higher productivity, simpler operations & maintenance, reduced latency and bottom-line results.
Next the conference moved headlong into the series of four parallel track sessions for the remainder of the day – a veritable sprint through 24 one-hour sessions with the occasional break for refreshments and for colleagues to share their learnings from the various presentations that they had seen. The Netezza presentations included everything from how (and why) the architecture of the NPS appliance is what it is "from the inside out", to achieving optimal performance with the NPS system to the product roadmap plans over the next 15-months, with several other items in-between. Customers' case study presentations (thirteen of them, in all) ranged the gamut of experiences in the decision-making to purchase a company's first NPS appliance, to detailed performance benefits and applications, to full-up business return-on-investment resulting directly from having deployed the NPS system.
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Tuesday evening we all reconvened on the Odyssey cruise ship for a "Vegas Night" evening of fun, food and libation, along with a great session with Ben Mezrich, author of "Bringing Down the House: The True Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions" and "Ugly Americans", both of which are currently being made into feature-length films. Quite literally just back from his honeymoon, Ben shared some of the great anecdotes that have come from research on his books and from having been essentially embedded on an MIT card-counting team. The laughs were plentiful, but they also showed how effectively the careful and appropriate analysis of data could be used to create a highly-leveraged strategic advantage (i.e., win millions of dollars from irate casino operators). <center> | <center>!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Netezza User Conference 2006/IMGP0676.jpg!</center> | <center>!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Netezza User Conference 2006/untitled.jpg!</center> | <center>!http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n148/nzfrisco/Netezza User Conference 2006/IMGP0668.jpg!</center> |
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And Then It Was Done
And finally, Wednesday morning arrived with some reflective views about the conference from Pat Scannell, on the state of BI from Donald MacCormack of Business Objects, and on the Netezza roadmap for technology direction by Bill Blake, Netezza's SVP of Development.
Donald's sharp wit, understanding of the industry and rapid-fire delivery was just the jolt of adrenaline everyone needed to start the morning after the previous night's "frivolities". He summarized the effect that Netezza's data warehouse appliance is having in the industry when teamed with partners like Business Objects as, "leading the second revolution in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing".
Bill Blake's presentation started from the basis of the accepted role of the Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance in the enterprise data center: customers no longer have to "settle" for weak performance, high expense and/or high degrees of complexity for their data warehouses. His presentation outlined the technology directions that will extend the capabilities of the NPS system forward and deliver unprecedented price-performance leadership building off key elements of the Netezza AMPPTM architecture for accelerating analytic database applications. Included in Bill's presentation was our roadmap to enable the Data Warehouse to "graduate from algebraic set operations on tables to the calculus of predictive analytics." Following Bill, Jim Baum's brief closing remarks (quoted above) put the whole event in perspective.
Before we knew it, the conference was over and people were preparing for their travels home and/or elsewhere. There were many warm handshakes and good-byes all around, along with 5-10 minute synopses of the things we had shared, learned and done over the past 72-hours. And the marketing team drew a collective sigh, thanked our luck for the fabulous Boston weather and clinked glasses all around before we (gasp!) again begin planning for next year's Conference.
We in Marketing had a great time putting this together and having it come off as well as it did and we hope that all of our guests enjoyed themselves and took a substantial amount of new innovative ideas away to help accelerate their businesses with Netezza. We hope to see you all (and then some!) at the 2007 International User Conference... ...and we'll see you back at this blog and elsewhere in the Netezza Community!
