A stimulus plan without pork? Doesn’t it just drive you crazy when you read about how these politicians are slipping in all these special budget line items in the stimulus plan, as if we are just plain ignorant to their old tricks? OK, here’s a stimulus plan for your business that all but eliminates wasteful spending from your DW/BI budget in 2009 and gives you capability to be more competitive in the years beyond! In fact our stimulus plan not only gives you a jolt of new analytics capability but seeks out and eliminates the “porkiest” of budget line items, those proprietary annual maintenance charges from Teradata and Netezza. Our plan eliminates these excesses and gives you a much more powerful, flexible and scalable infrastructure at the same time. Now that is change we all need!

Here’s our step by step plan that’s guaranteed to save you money.

Step one – tell Teradata and Netezza you are talking to us. Truth be told, that’s all you need to do to get a one time better price from them. This works because they’ve had a number of their biggest and most important customers go Greenplum in the last 12 months – all for the same reason.

Step two - tell them you need to reduce your maintenance charges right now by about $200k. Don’t forget to circle back to step one, if they try to hem and haw their way around the issue. This is your money and they have taken more than their fair share over the years. Insist on it and they will magically find a way to make it happen – I promise you. Take that roughly $200k savings and start with Greenplum. For that amount you get the hardware, software and services to stand up around a 4TB (usable) Greenplum DW right next to your EDW. It’s faster and more scalable than either of those proprietary technologies and, because it is based on general purpose commodity technology, it costs much less to implement and maintain.

Step three - instead of expanding your EDW to support a new requirement or build yet another DataMart on proprietary, specialized technology, host it on Greenplum. Now, you can experience the power of Greenplum, at very little risk or cost, and send a message to the fat cats that you have a choice in how you host and manage your enterprise data for analytics and business intelligence. Along the way, you are going to find we do things in advanced analytics that go way beyond their capabilities. This is the key point. When you realize what you can do inside a Greenplum DW it’s going to level the playing field and allow you to negotiate your next expansion or maintenance contract from a position of strength. You now have choice to manage your data, where it makes the most economical and business sense – inside the proprietary EDW or on an open, more scalable platform such as Greenplum. This is exactly what more than 50 of the largest and most innovative users of EDWs are already doing. Isn’t choice a great thing!