Compass Group UK and Ireland Accelerates its Business Intelligence Strategy with Netezza

Compass Group UK & Ireland will use Netezza's Data Warehouse Appliance to manage increasing volumes of data and improve overall delivery performance

Windsor, Berkshire.  January 13, 2010--Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ), the global leader in data warehouse and analytic appliances, today announced that Compass Group UK & Ireland has successfully deployed the Netezza® data warehouse appliance as a critical part of a strategic project to renew its entire business intelligence infrastructure. With Netezza, Compass is able to process substantial amounts of data and run extremely complex reports in just minutes, instead of hours.

"We are confident that we have chosen the right data warehouse appliance to give us that all important competitive advantage with our data," said Simon Marsh, IT Director at Compass Group UK & Ireland.  "When we asked vendors to undertake a Proof of Concept, Netezza clearly outperformed the rest and showed impressive speed improvements over the existing SQL Server environment of over 20 times. The ease of use and the performance of the Netezza Performance Server® is unquestionable."

The business reason to review the business intelligence (BI) infrastructure resulted from the growing demand on the company to provide robust, reliable and relevant management information (MIS) and BI as the organisation expanded. As the volume of data to be processed continued to increase, the existing systems required replacement. Consequently, Compass Group UK & Ireland embarked on a project to find the most efficient and effective technologies to meet the expected future requirements.

The installation and implementation process of incorporating Netezza was straight forward and rapid, producing detailed query results within days. In order to ensure the new MIS and BI objectives set by Compass Group UK & Ireland a full extract, transform and load (ETL) rewrite and restructure was also deployed.  This opened up avenues for Compass to also take advantage of ETL being processed directly onto the Netezza appliance providing even faster data transformation with zero impact to the network.

Guy Harvey, Data Warehouse Manager at Compass Group UK & Ireland said, "The relationship with Netezza has also impacted our database administration and maintenance costs - which have been reduced dramatically.  The support offered by Netezza and its technical account managers was outstanding including access to the ‘Enzee Community' which provides access to other useful tips and support." 

"Compass Group UK & Ireland is a great example of how Netezza can instantly integrate into an existing environment and illustrates how quickly comprehensive data analysis on huge volumes of data can be achieved," concluded Alan Cornwell, Vice President of EMEA Operations at Netezza.