Vision
In today’s business climate, every leading organization finds itself in the data business. With each click, call or transaction by a user, or other business activity, data is generated that can contribute to the aggregate knowledge of the business. Insights from such a database - business intelligence - can help an enterprise better understand its customers, detect problems, improve its operations, reduce risks or otherwise generate value for the business.
While it may at one time have been acceptable for companies to capture just the obviously ‘important’ data and throw the rest away, leading companies are coming to understand that the value of their data goes far deeper than they may initially understand. The decision of which data to keep and which to throw away – i.e. which data will prove to be important in the future – is extremely challenging hard to make. The result of this is that businesses must store and analyze data at the most detailed level possible if they want to be able to execute a wide variety of common business strategies. Combined with increased retention rates of 5-7 years or longer, and it is no surprise that typical data volumes are growing by 1.5 to 2.5x a year. Beyond size, the depth of analysis and complexity of business questions against the data can only be expected to grow.
In response to these needs, Greenplum is charting a path to support increasingly massive datasets with sophisticated analytical capabilities alongside traditional data warehousing requirements. Greenplum Database is scalable to petabytes and does so on low-cost commodity hardware (a key point of differentiation compared to our appliance-based competitors). Greenplum is continuing to add innovative features such as MapReduce. With that foundation, we are now focused on a future vision of delivering software into "enterprise data clouds" - the common compute platform for capturing and analyzing all data within an enterprise. Our current product and our roadmap are driving Greenplum toward the realization of this vision, one that our customers and partners embrace.
