by Ellen Rubin - Netezza, Vice President of Marketing

"Hang on - It's starting again
Hang on - There's no shelter from the wind
Hang on - Like a fire from the sky
Winds of change are blowin' by"

- closing chorus from "Winds of Change", by The Jefferson Starship and Grace Slick, 1982
[[click here for YouTube video]|http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z50G07A6HzE]

Witches, Elvis impersonators, bikers and the odd clown rush by, while outside, strong winds are blowing and the sky is dark and stormy.

Yes, it's Halloween at The Data Warehousing Institute's Orlando conference, and as 600 attendees try to celebrate without their families (actually, no one seemed too upset), Hurricane Noel is blowing in.

In fact, for the data warehouse community the storm has already hit. The appliance revolution has taken place and the impact is causing some extreme after-shocks. The talk around the halls was about appliances, and there were two half-day courses dedicated just to this topic. One was led by Richard Winter and Rick Burns of WinterCorp, providing an overview on appliances as well as a comparison of the different architectures and products on the market.

There’s certainly a need for this kind of information. Since Netezza launched the appliance category, built a community with well over 100 large customers and became publicly-listed, pretty much every major vendor in the industry has launched its version of an appliance, and at the TDWI show, several new players were clamoring for attention. It's pretty confusing for people who are just beginning to consider the appliance approach. Unlike the attendees at Netezza user conferences and events, the typical TDWI attendee is probably thinking something like this: "Boy, I’ve been hearing a lot about appliances lately, there seems to be a lot of news about them from TDWI and in the press, and Gartner says they're becoming mainstream. I better find out more about what they really can do and whether I need to think about this for my organization."

I guess when you've been evangelizing about the appliance concept for more than five years it's good to be reminded that in many ways, this is still a new frontier.

Back at the WinterCorp course, Richard talked about the market trends that have created a need for appliances, and made the point that "what you really want is to answer any question on any level of your data at any time." I couldn't agree more. Actually, he told a joke that really made the point: A doctor, a lawyer and a statistician went deer hunting. The doctor shot at a deer and was two feet too high and to the right. The lawyer shot and was two feet too low and to the left. The statistician said, "No need for me to shoot - according to the statistics, I've already hit the deer!" In case you missed the punchline, Richard added, "Sometimes, highly aggregated data does not get you the right answer for many business questions." Again, couldn't agree more: all the data, all the time is what appliances are about.

I also had a chat with Wayne Eckerson, a leader at TDWI and expert on predictive analytics. I was describing how, through our Netezza Developer Network, Netezza is opening up our appliance to developers all over the world who are doing new and cutting-edge analytics "on stream," leveraging Netezza’s streaming architecture. Wayne pointed out that there has really been an evolution over time from purpose-specific desktop systems just for the analysts in an organization who do the heavy quant work, to now, embedding some of that functionality in the data warehouse, and eventually, being able to combine it with the more traditional reporting and analysis work done by BI users. The new frontier in appliances is all about this broader role of analytics - including more groups of users, types of data and analytic algorithms - that can be done "inside the appliance," and as usual, Netezza customers and partners are at the forefront of the revolution.

Ellen Rubin