As you might have noticed, the title of this blog recently changed to “Partners in Play”.  The new name is a play on words in a handful of ways.  I’ll leave it up to you to guess the full list, but as you can see the most obvious is to communicate that partnering with Netezza is oftentimes a creative, and even playful, experience.  Based on the strength of our core product architecture, Netezza’s partners often come up with interesting, unexpected, and sometimes even surprising ways to leverage the technology. 

One of the programs that we’ve established to support this creative interaction with our partners is the Netezza Developer Network (NDN).  Established in the fall of 2007 at our annual user’s conference, the NDN was formed as a technical community to encourage in-database analytics using Netezza’s OnStream development platform. 

At the time, OnStream was a revolution in the way that partners and customers could interact with the platform.  For the first time ever, it was possible not only to carve up and push queries down next to data, but also to leverage the same paradigm to drive key application logic down to the data.  OnStream opened up many new possibilities for Netezza’s partners, and it required partners to think in fundamentally different ways about what was possible to achieve with a data warehouse.  The NDN was founded as a sort of sandbox in which partners could initially play and experiment with the OnStream technology, and ultimately push early concepts to the market as complete solution offerings.

The NDN is many things to many people. On the surface, it is a technical program to promote and support OnStream development by any and all users of Netezza.  For commercial partners developing OnStream applications, the NDN is also a business program that facilitates the commercialization of third party applications.  But at its core, the NDN is a hugely diverse community that is home to a remarkable variety of development activity.  I sometimes describe it like the cantina scene from Star Wars— every strange and wonderful type of project that you can imagine has taken place in the NDN sandbox, with more being undertaken every month.

Now that the early days of OnStream NDN are behind us, the temptation would be to transition to a more serious and less experimental tone for the program.  But that’s not the Netezza way.  Our company culture and user community will always see us keep at least one foot in the playful side of our partnership programs.  You can expect that the NDN will mature and evolve (in fact, I’ll plant a teaser here that you can expect some important announcements about the program over the summer…), but it will always include a sandbox for partners in play.  Stay tuned for more details in the coming months…