This morning HP is hosting a "Business Intelligence Chalk Talk" for the media. There, Ben Barnes, the head of HP's Business Intelligence group, part of what he calls, the company's "new" (sic!) software group presented Neoview. The data-warehouse software is built on top of a proprietary "Non-Stop" kernel (it's not Unix) and the "Non-Stop" SQL database which only works on HP Integrity servers.

"This is an integrated appliance. It only works on our hardware. The "Non-Stop" database is optimised for queries and decision support. Which is different from the version that the New York Stock Exchange uses and that is optimised for online transactions", confirmed Ben Barnes.

The "appliance" starts at $645,000 with 16 processors (it can scale up to 256 CPUs) and 4 TB of storage (2 TB can actually be used). For Barnes, Neoview is a "multi-billion dollars" growth opportunity that will give HP a "strategic" view of its Global 2000 enterprise customers and give it a sit at a table with CEOs and business line managers, not just CIOs.

Neoview was launched in "stealth" mode last October and is currently installed at 5 or 6 customers premises. The appliance is available directly from HP and through outsourcing deals, but no plan to have it as a software as a service (SaaS). Meaning that customers will need to add on top of the hardware consulting services fees from HP's Business Intelligence services group (formerly Knightsbridge).
The main competitors for Neoview are systems from start-up Netezza, Teradata/NCR and IBM (z series mainframe combined with a DB2 database).

"Netezza and Teradata do not have the reliability level of our solution. And IBM's is very expensive and provides lower performance", said Pankaj Mehra, strategist at HP's Information Services & Process Innovation Lab.

For HP Services customer Greenpoint Mortgage of Novato (CA), Neoview is too "big" for their needs.

"It's great if you deal with terabytes of data (like with credit card transactions), we only have gygabytes. But we like the fact that with Neoview you don't need to manage a "batch" window (loading and copying of the data from the database to the datawarehouse)", said Robert Sadler, senior VP of Decision Analytics.

The Bon-Ton stores are one of the early customers of Neoview (since July '06). They've transitioned off an IBM mainframe (z99) to a 64-processors Itanium server with 30 terabytes of storage.

"We were only using 20% of the mainframe CPU time. It was an expensive proposition", explained Jim Lance, CIO at the Bon-Ton stores.

He also liked the "non-stop" feature that enables him to reduce the "batch window" i.e. copying and loading the data in the database.

"Our stores close at midnight and open at 6AM. As we expand in different geographies, this window will ultimately disappear and we needed a system that could work 'non-stop'".