LITTLE ROCK — IBM agreed last week to buy Netezza, a data warehouse company, for $1.7 billion in cash, highlighting how much the fast-growing field of business intelligence is increasingly both a hardware and a software technology.
Netezza, based in Marlborough, Mass., makes computer appliances that combine hardware and software for business analytics, also known as business intelligence. Both terms refer to using computing to pluck useful answers and business insights from the explosion of data created by the Web, sensors, e-mail, purchase transactions, call-center reports and other sources.
In Netezza, IBM saw a company that had made “a breakthrough” in comparatively easy-to-use, hardware-and software computing appliances for business analytics, said Steven A. Mills, IBM’s senior vice president for software and systems. “And it clearly fits in nicely with our strategy of fit for-purpose systems, hardware and software,” Mills said.
Until recently, business intelligence had been seen as mainly a software technology. Information was stored in databases, and the software was sent in to mine the databases for answers.
Today, that approach is often too slow for fast-paced decision-making in both business and science. Increasingly, firms want real-time answers and smart predictions about things like buying trends, weather patterns and medical therapies.
Business, Pages 26 on 09/27/2010