Greenplum’s customers span a wide range of industries and vertical market segments. That is because Greenplum is a “horizontal” technology – high performance data analytics are useful for many kinds of businesses and are not limited by the type of industry, but rather by the readiness of the company to turn its data asset into a truly advantageous resource that helps them to become more competitive and run their business better.

One of Greenplum’s top pharmaceutical customers is in this category. Although I am not able to share their name because of their internal policies on public relations, I am able to share some details about their use of data and Greenplum Database. Their initial purchase from Greenplum in 2008 supported their marketing and sales efforts by enabling them to peel through retail POS data in the pharmaceutical industry and guide their sales organization to understand and respond to changes in demand for their products. The weekly retail information is generally available to companies throughout the pharma industry but Greenplum’s customer sought to gain advantage by increasing the speed with which they could ingest and crunch the data. Taking advantage of Greenplum Database’s fast loading and parallel processing power, the customer was able to get results to their sales organization within a day, gaining them critical response time in the cutthroat pharma market.

Over time, this customer began to expand their use of Greenplum Database and now in 2009 has implemented 80% of their Enterprise Data Warehouse, moving several terabytes out of Oracle. They use this data in a true EDW way, for G&A, HR, Finance, and soon in R&D. They continue to use their Oracle BI presentation layer as well as Cognos, and their analytical users plug SAS into the environment. They are building an orchestration layer for all their data – moving data, creating external tables, managing the metadata relational structure – all on Greenplum. They want to keep everything localized and reap the benefits of the platform that Greeplum calls the Enterprise Data Cloud™.

Why are they making this move from Oracle to Greenplum for their EDW? The top two factors are performance and cost. We are delighted that major pharmaceutical companies see the value of Greenplum for solid reasons such as performance and cost, but we also are happy that these customers understand the value of keeping all their data localized in one architecture, and that the architecture of choice is not a costly Oracle solution or an inflexible Data Warehouse Appliance solution, but rather a flexible, cost-effective Greenplum solution.