Dashboard Insight’s Maroushka Kanywani spoke with Jesse Fountain, DATAllegro’s VP, Pre-Sales Services and Joe Longtin, Product Marketing Manager, also at DATAllegro and they discussed corporate strategy and product development at DATAllegro.
Maroushka Kanywani: Could you please tell me about DATAllegro’s history?
Jesse Fountain: DATAllegro was founded in 2003 and we came out with a new idea on how to approach this data warehouse appliance thing. What we did was we took off-the-shelf hardware and we designed a very, very fast, massively parallel, processing system to break data up into very small pieces and then run queries concurrently against each of those small pieces. So then instead of queries taking hours, days and weeks to run, they would take seconds or minutes to run.
To offer some context, the world has been sort of suffering - data warehouses have become more and more mainstream and everyone wants to have everything in a data warehouse. Data warehouses have grown by leaps and bounds; we like to say they have grown geometrically at least - if not exponentially. Now companies are faced with a problem: they’ve got massive amounts of data and a large number of people who want to do trending, analysis and so forth and they just can’t do it and they’re really having a struggle managing that.
If these companies were to take these very large amounts of data and run them on conventional platforms like Oracle or DB2 or similar ones, while it can be done, there will be a couple of problems that the companies will run into.
The first problem is that it’s going to be extremely expensive for the companies to support that kind of environment on conventional platforms which we call SMPs, single multi-processing. What happens here is that everything is shared; shared CPUs, storage across multiple instances of Oracle or DB2. This works out to be very inefficient for very large databases. It also becomes prohibitively expensive because one is required to buy more and more iron in order to support basic functionality like running a query against the data warehouse.
MK: So essentially as the data grows, so does the expense of running and maintaining it.
JF: It grows almost exponentially – especially in conventional systems. So for the last 27 years the incumbent, called Teradata, over the decades has provided a largely separate and distinct proprietary platform that runs very large databases at extremely fast speeds. Teradata has enjoyed that luxury for the last couple of decades but there are more players in that space now – DATAllegro being one of them.
MK: You mention the issue of a proprietary platform and I understand that this is one of the distinguishing marks between DATAllegro and Netezza - DATAllegro does not use a proprietary platform. Could you tell me more about this, please?
JF: You’ve actually corrected me without even realizing it. Netezza is purely a proprietary environment and this has worked very well for them. They have found however, that it is difficult to get into certain companies which are resistant to proprietary architectures. In other words, for these companies, whatever vendor they deal with, they want them coming in with standard operating systems, standard storage, standard processors and so forth and that is not what Netezza is about.
MK: I’m not familiar with non-proprietary platforms; could you please tell me more about them?
JF: Let me give you an analogy that might make it easier. Let’s say you buy a car in the U.S. and you want to get maintenance done on that car. It would be really nice if you could walk into a garage which has standard parts, standard sizes and standard fittings because you would get much cheaper rates. On the other hand, if you buy a Lamborghini and go to the corner garage, it’s unlikely they’ll be able to fix that car since it does not use standard parts, making it very expensive and necessitating a visit to a specialist.
The same holds true with our appliances. If I brought something in that was entirely proprietary, my existing data center staff would not know how to maintain it since it is not standard storage, power, or behavior. A lot of big companies don’t like proprietary technology and while historically proprietary technology may be a great market disrupter it’s been proven that it does not go on indefinitely. It’s not scalable, interchangeable or re-usable.
DATAllegro uses Infiniband or GigE and these are standard communication protocols. Teradata, by comparison, uses BYNET, which is very proprietary. It is an intelligent network technology and could be considered the secret element to Teradata’s technology and it is what Teradata sells the most of.
MK: In terms of players in the same space, you’ve mentioned Teradata and Netezza. Who else would you include in the same space?
JF: Our third and only real main competitor in this space at this juncture in time is a company called Greenplum. Greenplum has been around longer than DATAllegro has and they’ve tried to find a home and it looks like they have. That home is Sun. Greenplum has partnered very closely with Sun and of all the companies out there, their architecture is most closely aligned, in terms of architecture with what DATAllegro does. They are an open architecture, they can run on just about any platform out there although they don’t sell themselves that way – they sell themselves exclusively on Sun.
MK: Are you engaged in any partnerships currently?
JF: We are. We have two kinds of partnerships we engage in; one of which is on the hardware side. We have very strong partnerships with EMC and Dell since we use that technology in our architecture. We also partner with Cisco because we use them as the communication protocol in our appliances.
Moving out beyond the hardware partnership we also have a partnership with Ingres Corporation. Ingres Corporation is an open source database that has been around for a long time. We chose them for this partnership and they’ve actually been instrumental in helping us get the data warehouse use of their technology off the ground. A lot of the engineers at Ingres have been there for quite a long while; in fact some of them are the original founders while some of them have actually gone into retirement, which tells you how old that product is. We like that aspect of Ingres and it has turned out to be a pretty good engine for us in terms of its openness and usability.
In addition to other partners beyond Ingres, EMC and Dell, we have partners in the BI space in the actual reporting space. Our partnerships primarily include all the big ones such as Business Objects, who are now part of SAP, Cognos, and MicroStrategy.
MK: Could you tell me what’s new in terms of products at DATAllegro?
JF: We released the data warehouse appliance v3.1 which had a couple of major components – the juiciest morsel being something called “partition management”, a common buzzword. What that means to the layperson is that when you load a lot of data into our appliance, you can get rid of a month or weeks’s worth of data, and then add a month or week’s load of data on the other end of it without having to reorganize or re-defragment the database. This is an enormous advantage for us because this means that companies that are constantly loading a firehouse of data everyday manage that data.
A second major point in the release is that it includes encryption, which we think should be enormously important but believe it or not, companies just don’t seem to be bellying up to the encryption bar as much as one would expect, for some reason.
We also launched our grid-enabled data warehouse appliances in the fall of 2007 to much buzz and currently have two customers in production. DATAllegro's grid technology allows customers to build distributed data warehouses such as hub-and-spoke as well as multi-temperature as being applicable to disaster recovery.
MK: Could you tell me more about DATAllegro’s sales channel? I read about the recent Series D funding DATAllegro received and that it has been earmarked for growing your sales channel.
JF: What’s happening is that we have a relatively small sales force; we have Regional Managers domestically in four regions and we have a Country Manager. What happens with our company at this moment is that we’re at that breaking point where we need to have more feet on the street and that is not a cheap venture. So some of the funding will go towards expanding our sales force and getting more feet on the street.
MK: Where are you headquartered?
JF: We are headquartered in Aliso Viejo in California. Our primary office is in Aliso Viejo but we also have field offices which are not formal offices per se. We’re still a very small company; about 100 people in total.
However, we’re running a very large organization in terms of revenue, which of course, I’m not at liberty to discuss but we’re doing quite well.
MK: Good for you. June 2008 marks DATAllegro’s 5th year in business and while you’re relatively new entrants into the data warehouse space, with some of your competitors having been in existence for at least 10 years, it is clear that you’re certainly making significant inroads in the data warehousing space. How are you able to do this?
JF: I’ll tell you something that I haven’t told any other analyst: a large part of our success is because within the company, we have an extremely low level of attrition. The organization has continued to grow not by hiring tons and tons of bodies but by being very selective about the “DNA” we bring into the family. There’s been a strong core team that has seen us through all these years and I think that’s one reason why we’ve been able to sustain the growth that we’ve achieved so far.
Our entire culture and infrastructure here is built around certain ethics if you will, and that is one of them – to control growth. We don’t want to just start hiring stream after stream of people without taking them into the ring or going over the hiring process with a very fine toothcomb.
MK: That’s a very thorough approach. Is there anything else you would like to add?
JF: I’d like to talk about DATAllegro’s partnership with Tom Coffing, who is the quintessential guru for Teradata. He’s actually known as Tera-Tom and is very well known. He’s built an organization that is primarily consulting implementation but he’s become more vendor-neutral. While he hasn’t abandoned Teradata, he’s recognized that there are up and coming appliances and he’d like to be a part of these newer solutions, where he would be involved in solving customer problems and not just handcuffing himself to a vendor.
Tom has partnered with DATAllegro to specifically help exploit, if you will, our architecture to existing Teradata customers. You see, we are not exactly like Teradata; what we like to say is that our architecture is what Teradata would be if Teradata had the chance to do it all over again. This is because DATAllegro uses modern technology, open source, open standard-based hardware and we do it in very, very eloquently simple architecture.
MK: A number of players in the BI space have indicated that a slowdown in the economy has sometimes translated into increasing requests for BI solutions. What has been DATAllegro’s experience so far?
JF: Well, that’s true. There is an inverse relationship between BI and the economy however we’re not seeing that. What we are seeing is the direct relationship of the economy and people increasingly becoming weary and wary of of paying exorbitant prices for datawarehousing.
What’s happening is that the demand for data warehousing and the demand for additional data is not going down; it may be going up due to wanting to have the capability to do more analytics, control costs and so forth. But DATAllegro is not planning to spend an exorbitant amount of money to build that additional infrastructure; we need to go out and start exploring other capabilities and possibilities and that's where our focus is right now.
MK: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, gentlemen. It was a pleasure.
(Copyright 2008 - Dashboard Insight - All rights reserved.)