Greenplum Unveils Plans
Greenplum Launches to Bring Open Source to Enterprise-Class Business Intelligence
Company Blends Open Source and Commodity Computing to Make Enterprise Data as Available to Business Users as Web Data is to Consumers
San Mateo , CA – April 18, 2005 – Greenplum launched today with the beta version of its Bizgres open source database for enterprise-class data warehousing. The company was established by veterans of Exodus, Oracle, Teradata and Tandem and open source with the mission to make enterprise data as available and easy to use for business users as Web data is for consumers.
Formed in 2003 with the merger of Metapa and Didera, Greenplum combines the high-performance business intelligence (BI) and analytic infrastructure of Metapa with Didera’s supercomputing platform for scaling database systems. The company will help enterprises in data-heavy industries like retail, telecommunications and banking, leverage open-source software and inexpensive, commodity computers to achieve 10-50X the performance at a fraction of the cost of currently available solutions.
“Imagine going to Google and waiting four days for your search results. Or visiting Yahoo! and waiting 72 hours for a page to load. No consumer would stand for that, yet CEOs and business managers tolerate exactly this on a daily basis when dealing with their BI systems,” said Sam Mohamad, CEO of Greenplum. “By using an open source database optimized with a supercomputing architecture, Greenplum aims to give businesses the same flexibility with their data that consumers enjoy with Yahoo! And Google.”
Traditional BI and data warehousing solutions are “big iron” solutions that cost a lot of money, take a long time to deploy, and are difficult and expensive to upgrade or replace. These kinds of solutions assume a high amount of exclusivity of access and are no longer practical for today’s businesses.
In a recent poll by the BI Network, more than 96 percent of respondents said the ability to choose their own hardware was either important or very important. Only open source software gives companies this kind of flexibility, and only the Greenplum family of products can deliver an open source software solution for data warehousing.
“Commodity computing and the advent of open source transformed the supercomputing world back in the 90s,” said Bill Inmon, commonly considered father of data warehousing. “In contrast, while BI has become a top IT priority, the database infrastructure on which BI systems are built has not evolved much over the past 20 years. Greenplum’s combination of open source, and commodity computing with supercomputing concepts for data warehousing gives makes sense for the industry.”
The Greenplum Product Family
Greenplum’s family of database products offers a range of solutions that span from the needs of a small departmental data mart to a multi-terabyte data warehouse.
Bizgres
Bizgres is the first open source, production-ready database server focused exclusively on the needs of BI applications. The free, downloadable database targets small- to-medium-sized companies with entry-level and departmental workloads such as data marts and reporting applications in the 10-300 Gigabyte range.
Bizgres is built upon the Bizgres Project. Also announced today, the Bizgres Project is a Greenplum-sponsored and community-supported open source project. The goal of the Bizgres Project is to work with the PostgreSQL community to build a complete, database system for business intelligence exclusively from free software. For more information, visit www.bizgres.org.
Bizgres MPP
For multi-terabyte warehousing, Greenplum will offer Bizgres MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) version, the first open source powered database server that can scale to support multi-terabyte data warehousing demands. Bizgres MPP will allow organizations to analyze business data 10 to 50 times the performance at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehousing solutions.
Unlike alternatives, Bizgres MPP will enable terabytes of data to be stored and processed using clusters of low-cost servers. By moving processing power next to the data so that analysis always occurs in parallel, Bizgres MPP can deliver a dramatic boost in query performance. In addition, Bizgres MPP’s Dynamic Provisioning technology will help companies to add incremental data warehouse capacity only where and when they need it, avoiding costly appliance upgrades. Bizgres MPP will be generally available in Fall 2005.
About Greenplum
Formed in 2003 with the merger of Metapa and Didera, Greenplum is an open source company dedicated to making enterprise data as available and easy to use for business users as Web data is for consumers. Greenplum’s breakthrough database products bring the power of open source to enterprise business intelligence. Greenplum is headquartered in San Mateo, CA. For more information visit, www.greenplum.com.