My Best Decision Today: Skipping Larry’s Fusion Speech
October 14, 2009 2 Comments
It’s been a good Oracle Open World so far, unless you wanted some exciting news about Fusion Apps. All the cyberworld was a-twitter (pun intended) about that during the run-up to the event. If that’s what you wanted, sorry – the payoff couldn’t have been flatter if the Governator had run over it with one of his Hummers. (More likely his wife would have done it while illegally talking on her cell phone.) There was a great theme this year: “Come With Questions. Leave With Answers.” Yup. And the answer was: “Wait till next year.” Read more of this post
ParAccel has seen some skepticism in the analyst community because of its relatively small published number of customers. It claims a dozen, and half are listed on its web site. Other vendors, like Vertica and Greenplum, have been very forthcoming promoting theirs, but both have more time in the market. PADB was released in Q4 2007 and really began its arc in 2008; Vertica has a year head start, and Greenplum even more. Rumors have also floated about whether CTO and founder Barry Zane was leaving. I had a conversation with Barry in late June to discuss the business and the benchmarks. He was clearly excited about the benchmarks, in which he was very involved, even working on the full disclosure report personally – “It got to be like a hobby for me,” he said – and he was quite clear that he is not going anywhere. 
Decades, indeed, but after all that time, Sand is a US$7M firm. Why is that? Their June visit to the Boulder BI Braintrust (BBBT) offered some clues. And some followup into public filings paints an unattractive financial picture that suggests any prospects should proceed with extreme caution. Sand’s phenomenal compression of data for “nearline storage” and analysis sounds good, but it’s hard to ignore their finances. 
Greenplum 
In the final excerpt from our interview with Marge Breya, we discuss the role of 
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