It was a busy week that has resulted from years of hard work for analytic database technology provider ParAccel who set a 30 terabyte TPC-H benchmark record with their price performance, then ParAccel proceeded to announce the close of $22 million of Series C financing led by Menlo Ventures and then the introduction of version 2.0 release of ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB). So setting records, raising funding and announcing major version of a sophisticated database is no easy feat and definitely raises the bar for any supplier who is trying to set their mark in the industry. But most important is that they are turning the data management buzz as I have written about into reality with a series of organizations who are now publicly speaking about their ParAccel deployments including AutoMetrics, Price Chopper and others.

For ParAccel to be successful and breakthrough the established perception and market share positions of database providers IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Teradata who are already being challenged by datawarehouse appliance provider Netezza requires more customers and continuous advancement in the technology to break into an already crowded segment. And yet with plenty of other new providers like Aster Data, Dataupia, Greenplum, InfoBright, Kognitio, Vertica along with existing providers HP and Sybase there is no lack of choices for buyers and suppliers to challenge. While this might seem overwhelming in number of choices for choosing an analytic database for your specific application or data warehouse need, these announcements help better understand the advancements at ParAccel. This is still not good enough as the analytic database technology must be simpler and significantly faster and cheaper than alternatives to edge itself through the crowd of all of these providers. This is what ParAccel is focused on achieving and has made a significant set of steps in that direction with their TPC-H announcement.

I had a chance to get into more detail with head of marketing and industry efforts at ParAccel, Kim Stanick to get the pre-briefing on these announcements which provided some time to digest the depth and meaning of their busy week and detail behind the TPC-H announcement. The depth of the analytic TPC-H benchmark is quite significant since it is set on 30 terabytes and places some teeth into the total cost of ownership (TCO) metric that is desperately missing in the majority of IT and CIO discussions and should matter as I have pointed out. Of course it is nice that ParAccel has made their technology available in a pre-configured appliance using Sun hardware that can be used to run a customer specific or even the TPC-H configuration.

The core though is the analytic database technology and Version 2.0 which will be available in August that introduces new techniques in their query optimizer called VOLT and as well the capability to fully leverage the storage area network (SAN) to maximize throughput and processing power of server and storage network. ParAccel has been able to prove how they can easily integrate disparate data marts and warehouses to provide a unified view through queries to the detail data without needing to make changes to underlying schemas or configurations of existing investments. Through integrating the power of MPP and columnar technology with compression and their query optimizer with specific data interconnect protocol and communications and other essential capabilities to optimize the performance of data warehouses which were found in our research to be important in advancing business to be able to use analytic and BI investments efficiently.

Now the road ahead is open for ParAccel to significantly grow and through continuing to bring customer validation and technology validation and let organizations examine their requirements and investments to see how they can dramatically reduce the TCO of analytic database needs and technology. It is clear that the ParAccel Analytic Database is one technology that organizations should examine more closely to determine how to be smarter, faster and much more thrifty in using IT budgets more wisely.

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Regards,

Mark Smith - CEO & EVP Research