If you had to go to the store to buy something important and you had to choose between a store with one cashier or one with 1000, which would you choose?

You might think this analogy is a little crazy when thinking about computers and computer software, but let me explain a little more. 

In today’s global, dynamic environment, agile and pervasive analytics and business intelligence is critical to success. Whether you are a retailer who wants to cut shrinkage by finding employees that are using discarded receipts to do returns without merchandise, an insurance firm who wants to limit liability by not insuring too many properties within flood regions, a financial firm that wants to detect fraudulent charges quickly, or a line of business executive that wants to find all of the open opportunities in your territory, you want access to the information you need, when you need it. You do not want to have to wait in line behind everyone else in your organization just to run your query/report.

But wait is what you will have to do if you buy one of the new HP/Microsoft Data Warehouse Appliances. Over the past couple of months Microsoft and HP announced three new Data Warehouse Appliances and have given them cool names like the “Business Decision Appliance” and “Business Data Warehouse Appliance”. Unless you are the only employee in your business, these appliances are not for you. Microsoft and HP’s own web sites say that these appliances are optimal for “light concurrency”.

Why spend your time loading data into one of these appliances, and then have to wait in line to get the results you need to run your business. If you buy a data warehouse appliance that supports only light concurrency, you're stuck waiting in line to get answers to your questions, which can often take over 24 hours to run.  If you want a high concurrency appliance, where these same queries run in minutes, consider Netezza.

IBM Netezza’s high-performance data warehouse appliances are purpose built to make advanced analytics on data simpler, faster and accessible to everyone. These data warehouse appliances are designed specifically to allow people across the enterprise to run complex analytics on very large data volumes, orders of magnitude faster than competing solutions. Customers are able to easily and cost effectively, scale their business intelligence and analytical infrastructure, to leverage deeper insights from growing data volumes, throughout the organization.

Nielsen gathers information from multiple sources and offers their clients a complete understanding of what consumers watch, listen to, browse and buy. Their analytics infrastructure is based on Netezza, and their end-user clients run close to a million queries a day, 50 times faster than on their previous systems. As The Neilsen Company’s Senior VP of Application Development has said, “when you’re able to get deep insights in 10 seconds instead of 24 hours, you can do remarkable things with the business”.