Netezza stock on the block

Seeks position as cash warehouse

By Austin Modine in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 27th March 2007 00:01 GMT

Data warehouse appliance maker Netezza seeks $100m with an initial public offering on the Nasdaq.

Netezza filed the IPO registration statement with the SEC on Friday. The company's stock will likely trade under the symbol "NTZA." Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse are the lead underwriters on the deal.

Although revenue has steadily increased (from $13.6m in fiscal 2004 to $79.6m in fiscal 2007), Netezza still needs to offset a $13.9m net loss for fiscal 2007.

The company makes high-end data warehouse systems called Netezza Performance Servers that patch together older, general-purpose systems to perform analysis on large amounts of "dynamic" data. The Massachusetts-based company has shipped over 200 of its appliances to 87 customers including AOL, Amazon.com, CNET, Orange UK, CompuCredit Corp. and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The company faces staunch competition from rivals including Teradata, EMC, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard.

Netezza is looking to expand into the mid-range market with the Turnkey Business Intelligence appliance announced last week. The system currently has one and three terabyte configurations available.

HP launched its own BI play, Neoview, in early October. ®

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