SOURCE: Infobright

September 15, 2008 08:00 ET

Infobright Launches Open Source Data Warehouse Offerings: Infobright Community Edition and the www.infobright.org Community

Data Warehouse Market Joins Open Source Revolution With the Ultimate Combination of Power, Ease-of-Use, and Low Cost-of-Ownership

TORONTO--(Marketwire - September 15, 2008) - Infobright, a technology leader in analytic data warehousing, today announced availability of its new open source data warehouse software, Infobright Community Edition (ICE). This enterprise-class, self-managing solution is a proven alternative to today's high-cost, high-maintenance data warehouse products.

Infobright is also launching www.infobright.org, the new community home and development portal for open source enthusiasts with corporate data warehouse needs. As part of Infobright's commitment to fast, responsive development, and innovation, www.infobright.org will include links to product downloads and developer/user communities for a variety of open source database, business intelligence, and data warehouse projects.

The need for business analytics has grown dramatically across all industries, and has outpaced the technical expertise and budget of companies outside the Fortune 500. Designed for analytic applications, ICE is easy to use, simple to manage, and designed to handle data volumes from 500GB to 30TB. ICE combines a column-oriented database with a unique Knowledge Grid architecture to eliminate the complexity inherent in traditional data warehouse products. It also eliminates the costly hardware infrastructure and time-consuming manual processes required to build, tune, and maintain a data warehouse. ICE is integrated with Sun Microsystems' MySQL database, the world's most popular open source database, delivering the industry's most scalable data warehouse platform for MySQL.

"It isn't only the Wal-Marts of the world who need to analyze terabytes of customer data on the spot. Today, the success of companies of all sizes, across all industries, depends on extracting critical business information from the massive volumes of data they collect," said Claudia Imhoff, founder and president of Intelligent Solutions. "Just as open source software has disrupted operating systems, middleware, and databases, a new disruptor -- the open source data warehouse -- promises to make this technology available to a wider range of businesses."

"Data warehousing was always targeted to deep-pocketed organizations with the budget and staffs to purchase, install, and maintain these platforms," said Miriam Tuerk, president and CEO of Infobright. "Eighteen months ago Infobright introduced a solution that was 90 percent less work to implement and maintain. Now we are continuing the data warehouse revolution and shattering the final barrier to complex data analysis -- purchase price. Moreover, this will help build a vibrant community of users and developers, bringing data warehousing to every company that needs it."

About ICE

ICE provides key features and benefits which make the Infobright solution unique in its class.

"Infobright is breaking through the glass ceiling where the resources and costs have made data warehousing out of reach for too many businesses," said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Ventana Research. "By making its innovative technology available as open source through an Internet based community, Infobright is simplifying and broadening the access to data warehousing technology."

+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
|Columnar Database with |* Ideal architecture for analytic data           |
|Industry Leading       |   warehousing, delivering excellent performance |
|Compression            |   and very high data compression                |
|                       |* Achieves compression levels ranging from 10:1  |
|                       |  to 40:1                                        |
+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
|High Scalability /     |* Designed for large data volumes ranging from   |
|Superior Performance   |   500GB to 30TB                                 |
|                       |* Outstanding performance for complex queries    |
|                       |* Load time and query performance remain constant|
|                       |  as the database grows                          |
+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
|Self-Managing          |* Load-and-go using existing schema              |
|                       |* No materialized views, data partitioning, or   |
|                       |  indexes required                               |
|                       |* No tuning or manual intervention: automatically|
|                       |  maintains all Knowledge Grid structures across |
|                       |  every column in the database                   |
+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
|Off-the-Shelf, Low Cost|* Runs on industry standard servers              |
|Hardware               |* Minimal storage requirements due to high       |
|                       |  compression                                    |
|                       |* Up to 30TB of data supported with single server|
+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------------+
|BI Flexibility / MySQL |* Out-of-the-box support for leading BI tools    |
|Integration            |  including Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Cognos, Business|
|                       |  Objects, SAS, and MicroStrategy                |
|                       |* Supports standard database interfaces,         |
|                       |  including ODBC, JDBC and native connections    |
|                       |* Supported APIs include C, C++, C#, Borland     |
|                       |  Delphi (via dbExpress), Eiffel, SmallTalk, Java|
|                       |  (with a native Java driver implementation),    |
|                       |  Lisp, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, REALbasic,      |
|                       |  FreeBasic, and Tcl                             |
+-----------------------+-------------------------------------------------+

Availability and Product Information

ICE is available immediately for download at www.infobright.org. Infobright will continue to offer its commercial product, Infobright Enterprise Edition (IEE), for organizations with more sophisticated requirements including enhanced features, services and support, warranty, and other benefits.

Industry Commentary

Brian Gentile, President and CEO, Jaspersoft

"With downloads of Jaspersoft's products topping the six-million mark, there clearly is a huge community involved in the open source BI revolution and a tremendous need for an open source data warehouse. With Sun's MySQL database, Infobright, and Jaspersoft, small and medium businesses can now rapidly and affordably transform massive amounts of business data into insightful, timely information."

Matt Filios, Community Management Practice Lead, Olliance Group

"We congratulate Infobright -- for not only taking a robust analytic data warehouse solution open source, but also for aggressively building a community where BI and data warehouse professionals can actively collaborate on current and future data warehousing technologies. Infobright.org is an outstanding resource for IT and BI professionals to get a better understanding of data warehousing nuances, while also getting a big picture view of the DW/BI landscape."

Richard Daley, Founder and CEO, Pentaho

"We are seeing a pent-up demand across companies of all sizes for ever more sophisticated analysis and data warehouse products within our open source ETL community. Infobright's forum and open source solution will be a welcome addition to our ecosystem and we are looking forward to even more exciting innovation as the communities cross-pollinate across the MySQL domain."

Marten Mickos, Senior Vice President, Database Group, Sun Microsystems

"Sun applauds Infobright's new initiative to leverage the open source model to create a radically simple, low-cost analytic database. We are seeing enterprise customer demand for this type of data warehouse solution. We are excited to extend our relationship with Infobright to pursue this opportunity." (link to funding release)

About Infobright

Infobright, the open source data warehousing company, has pioneered the development of self-managing data warehouse software. The critical need for business intelligence, coupled with the dramatic growth of corporate data, has outpaced IT's resources and budget within many companies. Infobright's technology solves this problem by delivering a highly scalable analytic data warehouse that reduces ongoing management by up to 90 percent and costs significantly less than other data warehouse solutions. Infobright's solution is being used by companies in online marketing, financial services, and other industries to provide rapid access to critical business data with unmatched operational simplicity. For more information, please visit www.infobright.com.

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