Blog: William McKnight

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HP at the IAP

I was looking forward to this presentation. However, I must admit, with the plethora of appliance vendors who have hit the market lately and made their way onto client short-cum-long lists, I was more than happy to dismiss NeoView if this data point did not move the story forward several paces. However, Greg Battas addressed NeoView's lack of market penetration and their 'soft roll out' up front. They spent a full year with customers before the announcement in 2007.

HP, as a company, was losing big deals to IBM and Oracle since those 2 had full suites. Back in 2004/2005, Tandem (now part of HP) had built an earlier form of NeoView, but ultimately didn’t go to market with it because they didn’t want to compete with Oracle. That's not an issue now.

The first place to test NeoView was at HP itself, where they have, according to Greg, shut down 500 internal databases in a consolidation project.

HP still lacks in the data access space. Obviously, they were looking at BO and Cognos as well as SAP and Oracle did. They are working closely with Ab Initio for ETL although they're philosophy is less 'load and analyze' and more 'ingest and do things inline.' The philosophy, supposedly manifested in the architecture, is very Operational BI-centric.

NeoView is meant to be a "Teradata killer." However, as Greg pointed out, the road is littered with those who claimed to be "better than Teradata" and still, there's Teradata.

Technorati tags: Business Intelligence, Independent Analyst Platform, HP, NeoView

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