LAS VEGAS, Feb. 18 -- Kognitio, a leading global provider of business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing solutions, today announced its entry into the North American market, where it will make its WX2 analytical relational database management system (RDBMS) available to companies seeking to rapidly gain competitive insight from enterprise-wide data assets. The announcement made at the start of The Data Warehousing Institute's World Conference being held this week in Las Vegas, where Kognitio is an exhibiting vendor.

The company also said it has named industry veteran John K. Thompson to head its North American operations. In a career spanning two dozen years, Thompson has held senior sales, technology, marketing and business development positions at companies such as Nielsen, WhiteCross Systems, PLATINUM technology, IBM and Metaphor Computer Systems.

Kognitio WX2 is the most powerful and scalable analytical database software in the industry, enabling enterprises and organizations to query, in detail, vast amounts of granular data in seconds. WX2 breaks new ground in delivering high-speed data access to large and/or complex data volumes in any one of three ways:

• In a software-only configuration, allowing companies to implement WX2 using low-cost industry-standard x86 hardware.

• As a custom-configured data warehousing appliance.

• Through its innovative Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) offering, ideal for companies that want to reduce the time to value or increase the speed at which insights are achieved, allowing them to conduct large scale data analytics projects on a flexible and cost-effective basis without the need to rely on over-stretched IT departments or forcing them to make budget-busting investments.

More than 20 years of development enables Kognitio WX2 users to gain greater benefits in less time; tests have consistently shown WX2 to run as much as 100 times faster than traditional databases.

"As the market moves rapidly toward transactional BI, Kognitio may have an inside track toward meeting the analytical needs of firms and assuming a leadership role in the industry," said industry veteran Bill Inmon, the "father of data warehousing." In a new whitepaper, "Driving increased performance and lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO) in the analytical environment," Inmon writes, "Kognitio should be strongly considered by companies where BI is needed to help them gain and maintain a competitive advantage."

Kognitio has emerged as a leader in the markets it serves, with blue-chip organizations like British Telecom (BT), Scottish Power and the Tattershall Castle Group (TCG) relying on WX2. Moreover, Kognitio's innovative flexible pricing and deployment strategies allow companies to better allocate the assets they need across multiple locations without requiring them to buy separate licenses for each site, a key advantage for larger firms.

"We installed WX2 in just two hours, and loaded our data in 50 minutes instead of the 36 hours it took us previously. Now, we can run analytical queries with sub-second response times," said Philip Papadopoulos, program director for grid and cluster computing at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), Kognitio's first customer in the United States. Calit2 is using WX2 to help bioinformatics researchers analyze data from its Cyberinfrastructure for Advanced Marine Microbial Ecology Research and Analysis (CAMERA) project. "As a result, the research community we serve has the ability to analyze the CAMERA data sets in a dramatically improved manner." he added.

Calit2 chose Kognitio WX2 based on a number of factors, including the projected levels of data management and query complexity, variable workload and data loading requirements, the variety of data types and sources and the need to have the system available at all times. In addition, Calit2 wanted a data management and analysis environment that provided mature and robust systems management tools, and required minimal recovery time in the event of a system crash.

"Analytics nowadays are all about space, time, and cost," said Philip Russom, senior manager at TDWI Research. "Multiple terabytes of data take up a lot of space, and users have very little time to integrate the data into a data warehouse platform. Then, queries have to scan multi-terabyte data volumes in a few seconds or less. Since this kind of analytic application is usually funded by a departmental budget, low cost is critical. For these and other types of applications, user organizations are today turning to alternative MPP data warehouse platforms that are based on database management systems built specifically for data warehousing and coupled with commodity hardware and open source software. Kognitio WX2 is a data warehouse platform that - among other things - satisfies the demanding requirements for space, time, and cost seen in modern analytic applications," he added. Kognitio officials noted that in many cases, the total cost of ownership (TCO) from a WX2 implementation may run less than half the money required by competing solutions.

"There is an explosion of companies that need insights hidden in diverse enterprise-wide data assets. Traditional methods no longer work in the time frame at a cost that these companies want. They are looking for help from powerful analytical tools, deployed in a way that makes sense for them, as an on-premise or service-based solution," said Thompson. "With WX2 providing the most flexible ways to implement, and virtually obliterating the wait time for results in many cases, Kognitio is uniquely qualified to help these companies meet their requirements of quickly putting their data and analysts to work, delivering solid business benefits."

About Kognitio

Kognitio (www.kognitio.com) is an innovative, technology-rich company, providing leading-edge solutions to business problems that require the acquisition, rationalization and analysis of large or complex data. Kognitio's WX2 is the industry's fastest and most scalable analytical database on the market, giving firms the ability to turn their raw data into valuable business insight fast, and empowering its customers to realize comprehensive answers to critical business questions. Globally headquartered in Marlow, England, with North American headquarters in Chicago, Kognitio delivers competitive advantage to its clients across a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, financial services and utilities.

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Source: Kognitio