Netezza Makes Its Intentions Public

Data warehouse appliance firm Netezza is the latest company to ride the storage IPO wave.

The Netezza Performance Server integrates database, server and storage platforms and interacts with external systems to acquire and retain raw data, receive query instructions and provide analytical results. The data warehouse acts as a data repository for an enterprise, aggregating information from many departments and enabling analytics through the querying of the data to deliver results. The appliances store from 3TB to 100TB of data.

Its competitors include EMC, HP, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Sybase and NCR’s Teradata.

The niche has been kind to Netezza. The company has shipped more than 200 appliances to 87 customers, among them Amazon.com, in the process growing revenues from $14 million to $80 million in three years. Sales rose nearly 50 percent last year.

But the company remains a long way from profitability. Netezza lost $14 million in its fiscal 2007, which ended Jan. 31. That’s down from a $20 million loss in fiscal 2006 attributable to common shareholders. The company had $5 million in cash as of Jan. 31 and an accumulated deficit of about $81 million.

Netazza hopes to raise $100 million in its IPO. The stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the symbol “NTZA.”

The company’s investors include Matrix Partners, Charles River Partnership, Battery Ventures, Sequoia Capital and Meritech Capital. Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley are the lead managers for the offering.

Dataupia used the occasion of Netezza’s S-1 filing to trumpet its own entry into the field. Foster Hinshaw, former CTO and co-founder of Netezza and current CEO of Dataupia, said in a statement that “The appliance model has now been proven with rapid adoption across the networking, security and storage infrastructure industries. … Netezza’s success in the market validates the need for this model. However, there is much more that can be done to democratize the technology and business benefits of data warehousing and make them available to users across the entire enterprise.”

Hinshaw said he plans to do just that with his latest venture.

The last year has been a good one for storage IPOs, with CommVault, Isilon, Mellanox, Double-Take and Riverbed all going public.

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