Netezza serves business intelligence customers. Up until now, Netezza was known as a provider of an appliance for BI. Recall an appliance is hardware configured specially to make the installed software, in this case a database, scream. (I wrote about geospatial appliances last year.) The big news is that the company has now added a spatial extension to its data warehouse appliance.

So what? Go back to that “scream” reference. The appliance allows BI analyses to be done much, much faster - 10 to 20 to 100 times faster. So, if you need your geospatial analyses to be done much, much faster, this may be a solution to consider.

Who’s a candidate for this appliance? The clearest answer for me is that there are two types of potential users: (1) those doing BI (perhaps with Netezza but not necessarily) that want to add geospatial data and analysis and (2) those doing geospatial who need that optimized level of performance.

Do you need to leave your Oracle Spatial or ArcSDE or SQL Server 2008 or PostGIS, etc. implementation behind? Not necessarily. It may be worthwhile to load the data into Netezza for large, CPU demanding analyses and leave the existing spatial database for other types of work. Further, you need not leave your GIS software and applications behind. Netezza has lined several familiar names whose products have been certified to run as clients against the Netezza warehouse: Safe, MapInfo, Idea Integration, Intergraph, SRC and thincSoft.

The announcement will be made next week at the Netezza User Conference in Florida. The company is based in Marlborough, Massachusetts and has 200 clients. It’s publicly traded and brought in $127 million in revenue last year.