And now it's time for Data Warehouses as a Service

Kognitio monitors toaster inventory over the wire

By Ashlee Vance in Santa Clara • Get more from this author

Posted in Storage, 27th April 2008 07:21 GMT

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The company brags about 14 minute load times for large volumes of data and 6 minutes for data transformations. So, it's the speedy attributes of WX2 that help it make sense under the DaaS model, according to Thompson.

"WX2 reduces upfront data management, modeling and load times dramatically," Thompson said. "With most merchant databases, you still have to do a lot of modeling, indexing and aggregating. With WX2, you don't have to do any of that."

Those of you in the UK might be familiar Whitecross Systems, whose IP Kognitio acquired in 2005 in order to keep developing WX2. Now, the company looks to heighten its presence in the US by selling WX2 and by creating a DaaS operation. Kognitio plans to have a US data center up and running in the next six weeks, Thompson said.

This is the part of the story where we usually tell you how Kognitio prices its wares. But Thompson declined to provide any specific information at this time, saying that pricing will fluctuate quite a bit based on the job. He would only say that the DaaS service comes in at half the cost of data warehouse appliances from competitors. If you're like us, then it's difficult to judge the veracity of such a line without, er, data to back it up.

Some appliances such as those from Netezza run on specialized hardware, while others from the likes of DATAllegro rely on specific stacks of partner hardware. Kognitio thinks it has the better approach whether you're doing DaaS or in-house work, since it will run on just about any x86 servers and storage.

"We submit SQL into machine code where it's running on x86 chips in native mode," Thompson said. "The reason people have to certify on certain platforms is because they're running SQL in an emulated mode."

Kognitio targets mid-sized to large businesses and is looking for companies in a wide variety of industries to embrace data warehousing. It's betting that many of these customers - be they life sciences or media firms - will turn to the DaaS model rather than dealing with these rather complex systems in-house.

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