That’s the view of Diane Kolonko, CEO of the Bracknell, UK-based firm. Speaking to ComputerWire. Kolonko sees the company’s migration to standard blade servers as a natural evolution because of the close similarities with its own proprietary hardware.
Our transition to blades has been very easy, Kolonko said. We’ve essentially developed a proprietary blade server all along. If you look as an HP blade server and an old WhiteCross rack they’re more or less exactly the same, she said.
Having dumped its proprietary hardware platform last year, WhiteCross threw its technology lot into blade servers in the third quarter this year and subsequently launched a new version of its WX/DES analytic database running on standard blade servers from HP, IBM and RLX under Linux.
Despite the hardware transition WhiteCross continues to offer its analytic system as both an application service provider (ASP) – ie hosted a series of analytic applications on its own blade server farm located at its Bracknell data center – as well as a licensed software offering.
Kolonko reaffirmed that services still are a still a strong focus for the company, but she is aiming for a more balanced 50-50 split with software next year.
We’re still committed to selling services as well, particularly to those companies with high data volumes and throughput and query complexity that struggle to provide these services internally.
WhiteCross was founded in 1987 to provide a massively parallel processing (MPP) database engine designed for high data volume and complex query handling requirements. The company comes out of the same mould as Teradata and Netezza Corp, in that it has purpose-designed a database machine (database, server and storage) that runs BI and analytic applications much faster than conventional data warehouses. Like its major rival at the time, Teradata, the WhiteCross system was tied to proprietary hardware. But unlike Teradata, which had the substantial backing of NCR Corp, it never translated its early market promise to leadership in the market.
Following a new round of investment in the late 1990s and a realization that few companies were interested in proprietary hardware any more, WhiteCross decided a change its stance by building its hardware on standard Intel processors and moving to an ASP model – initially to provide services for analyzing call center records, Web clickstream data. The advent of powerful blade server technology from HP and IBM pushed WhiteCross towards a commodity hardware model which Kolonko believes will raise the company’s market potential considerably
Kolonko sees several benefits to migrating to an industry standard architecture.
We’ve been watching developments in higher performance blades closely. HP and IBM have both pumped large amount of research resource into blades which has the advantage of keeping us on the leading edge of the technology curve.
It also frees up our internal MPP database development resources which can now be re-directed towards fine-tuning our analytic applications and services.
Kolonko also believes it allows the company to provide a lower-cost and scalable platform to run on. We’re competitive with the likes of Netezza with a price point comparable to them, she said.
Traditionally WhiteCross has focused on the very high-end of the market – which admittedly has limited the potential of its client roster. Kolonko said the company has notched up a modest 15 customers so far – though most are large deals, usually based on two or three year agreements. WhiteCross has also carved out a strong niche in the European telco, financial services and retail sectors. Marquee clients include BT, NTL, Cable & Wireless, CNN and AT&T.
Kolonko said the company is also seeking partners in new verticals – keeping a particularly close eye on the utilities and government sectors.
WhiteCross’ focus on the high-end of the market is unlikely to change according to Kolonko despite the immense opportunities for ASP solutions in the mid-market.
Recently Netezza lowered pricing (less than $300,000 per system) for its Performance Server data warehousing appliance to reach out to more modest data environments.
We’ll continue to prospecting in the customer base where companies have issues with data complexity and volume, Kolonko said.
Kolonko claims that many of its immediate prospects are companies struggling to scale up existing data warehousing solutions such as Oracle. She points to benchmarks conducted by the firm that show WhiteCross can achieve up to 50 or 60 times better data load and query performance.
At an application level we’re still focused on the application level where companies need to complex analysis and modeling on full detail data, This is why we’ve gained a lot of business among telcos – for applications like tariff management and customer segmentation using behavioral data.
Kolonko however acknowledged that the company is still waiting to sign up new customers onto its blade server platform but expects customer to migrate over to its blade server platform in due course.
We have many prospects and expect this to change before the end of this year, she said.
Our preferred blade platform is the HP ProLiant Blade series.
Kolonko added that the company’s prime focus is now in Europe having shut down its data center in San Francisco. She said the company now operates almost exclusively through partners in the US.
