Best of breed
I am an advocate of making hardware and software implementations as simple as possible for everyone involved. When it comes to “version 1” of Data Warehouse Appliances, however, I become Pooh Bear. Pooh, you see, has a small brain and when a new thought enters it, he has to push the old one out of the way. There simply isn’t room in there for two thoughts at the same time.
Right now the two thoughts I’m having trouble handling at the same time are my aforementioned love of simplicity, and my fundamental belief in best-of-breed solutions.
The most successful companies are almost always the ones with a high level of focus on their core competencies. Coca-Cola doesn’t make their own delivery trucks. McDonald’s doesn’t sell shoes to stand in their queues. Apple doesn’t run their own cellular network. Amazon doesn’t run their own parcel delivery service. And Google doesn’t sell beer to drink while watching their YouTube videos.
Data warehouses should be no exception. Because they’re a conglomeration of moving parts, however, they can seem complicated. That’s why Data Warehouse Appliances took off. By hiding all the moving parts and putting them in the hands of a single vendor, a trade off was made — the appearance of simplicity (and a high price tag) at the expense of best-of-breed technology.
Unfortunately, unless your Data Warehouse Appliance Vendor has the world’s best analytic software (and they can’t — because SAND does), the best servers, the best hard drive components, etc., then they are simply building a second rate box — in everything but the size of the price tag.
Businesses need best-of-breed analytics, not carefully orchestrated simplicity in exorbitantly expensive, proprietary boxes. They need the right software to get the right answers at the right time, not just the right parts that fit in the right rack when last someone tied a bow on them in the lab.
SAND focuses on just one thing — making the best analytic database software on the planet. It works on all platforms. It performs for any query at any time. It easily scales across the enterprise. It requires zero maintenance.
When I’m asked about SAND’s Data Warehouse Appliance strategy, that’s the answer I give. Businesses running SAND get best-of-breed software to maintain competitive advantage. And no matter where or on what we’re deployed, we provide better analytics, higher performance, and faster ROI than any shiny, expensive, locked-down box on the market.