Wikipedia
Netezza (pronounced Ne-Tease-Ah) designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.
Founded in 1999 by Foster Hinshaw, Netezza was purchased by IBM in 2010 for $1.7 billion. Netezza and Hinshaw are credited with creating the data warehouse appliance category to address consumer analytics efficiently by providing a modular, scalable, easy-to-manage database system that’s cost effective. This class of machine is necessary to manage the "data-intense" workloads of modern analytics and discovery that are not well handled with legacy technologies, most of which are designed around traditional "computer-centric" workloads.
Netezza's implementation is characterized by (a) data-intelligent shared-nothing architecture, where the entire query is executed on the nodes with emphasis on minimizing data movement; (b) use of commodity FPGA's to augment the CPU's and minimize network bus traffic; and (c) embedded analytics at the storage level.
Netezza is based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, with 19 offices in more than 12 countries, including the UK, Japan, China and Germany. As of August 2010, Netezza had a workforce of 469 employees. The company opened a new development lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts in August 2010.
Netezza is widely credited for either inventing or bringing renewed attention to the data warehouse appliance category, depending upon whether one regards long-time data warehouse technology vendor Teradata as having been in the data warehouse appliance category all along.