Premier selects Netezza to power business intelligence efforts and healthcare analytics servicesTera-Scale Data Warehouse Appliance Helps Premier Identify Best Possible Treatments for Hospitals and Patients Framingham, Mass., February 2, 2004 Netezza Corporation today announced that Premier, Inc., a leading strategic alliance in U.S. healthcare, has chosen the Netezza Performance Serverä (NPSä) appliance to provide the data warehousing backbone for its current and future informatics analytical services to hundreds of hospitals across the nation. After evaluating the NPS system against its existing data warehousing infrastructure, Premier selected Netezza. The selection was due primarily to Netezza’s ability to deliver a significant increase in speed and comprehensiveness for complex queries of Premier’s Perspective™ data warehouse, the largest and most complete repository of clinical and resource utilization data for the nation’s hospitals and healthcare systems. This enhanced performance coupled with the dramatic decrease in total cost of ownership made the NPS product a natural fit within Premier’s strategic technology direction. Premier’s Pharmaceutical Research Services division will be one of the early beneficiaries of the NPS system. This organization provides drug utilization and other aggregate hospital data and research services to companies in the following sectors: pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, diagnostics industries, government, academic healthcare researchers and private research groups. The Pharmaceutical Research Services division draws clinical, financial and demographic inpatient metrics from Premier's Perspective data warehouse. “Our Informatics business intelligence products are some of the most valuable resources we provide to our alliance members and other hospitals,” said Gary Feierstein, vice president of information technology at Premier. “Netezza gives us the opportunity to improve and extend these services by powering the intelligence infrastructure that we use for queries of terabytes of data. When we validated the dramatic increase in flexibility, speed and overall performance of the NPS appliance, along with a lower total cost of ownership, the decision to replace our existing processing infrastructure was straightforward.” The Premier healthcare alliance is collectively owned by 200 of the nation's leading hospital and healthcare systems. Together, these systems operate or are affiliated with nearly 1,500 hospital facilities and hundreds of other healthcare sites. Premier provides informatics services and solutions to its alliance members and other subscribing hospitals, helping these organizations leverage operational, patient, purchasing and other types of data to aide in making more informed, intelligent business decisions. As the number of alliance members and Premier services has grown, so too have the company’s processing and analysis needs. The company found itself regularly having to upgrade and expand its storage, server, processing and data warehousing capacity to accommodate the new growth, and even then many complex analytics queries were taking extended periods of time. Premier selected the NPS system to overcome this hurdle and to prepare itself for the demands of the future. The NPS system will power analytics using applications from SAS, Hyperion’s Brio and MicroStrategy. “Healthcare is one of the most data-driven and intensive industries in the world, making informatics a high-return, high-impact solution for forward-thinking organizations like Premier,” said Jit Saxena, co-founder and CEO of Netezza Corp. “Netezza continues to change the economics of BI and data warehousing for leading-edge organizations in industries such as telecommunications, retail and the life sciences. As a result, these companies are making faster and better business decisions and providing more strategic services to their customers.” The NPS system architecturally integrates servers, storage and a relational database into a single powerful, enterprise-class appliance created from the outset to process queries faster and enable complex analysis that was not previously possible because of large and fast-growing data sizes. This unprecedented analysis enables companies to harness information located in tens, even hundreds, of terabytes of data in order to lower costs, reduce risk and fraud, strengthen customer relationships and keep pace with ever-changing market trends. About Premier Premier, Inc. is a strategic healthcare alliance entirely owned by 200 of the nation's leading hospital and healthcare systems. These systems operate or are affiliated with 1,500 hospital facilities and hundreds of other care sites. Premier provides an array of resources supporting health services delivery, including group purchasing for more than $17 billion annually in supplies and equipment. Other resources offered by Premier are insurance programs and performance improvement services of many kinds. Premier is headquartered in San Diego, CA, with other major facilities in Chicago, IL, and Charlotte, NC. Advocacy and policy offices are located in Washington, DC. For more information, please visit www.premierinc.com. About Netezza Corporation Netezza is a fast-growing provider of enterprise-class data appliances for on-demand analysis of terabytes of business-critical information. The Netezza Performance Server™ (NPS™) system is the first enterprise-class data appliance optimized for Business Intelligence (BI) on tens, even hundreds, of terabytes of data in today’s real-time enterprise. The NPS 8000 series delivers 10 to 50 times the performance for large, complex and constantly evolving BI efforts at half the cost of existing, general-purpose enterprise data warehouse systems. The NPS appliance is being used by data-intensive organizations in telecommunications, financial services, retail, bioinformatics, government and other markets to enable faster, more sophisticated analysis while allowing companies to leverage their existing infrastructure. Founded in 2000 and based in Framingham, Mass., the Company has raised more than $53M from leading venture capital firms, including Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures, Battery Ventures, Orange Ventures and Sequoia Capital. # # # Netezza, the Netezza logo, NPS, Performance Server, Netezza Performance Server, Intelligent Query Streaming, Asymmetric Massively Parallel Processing, AMPP and SQL-BLAST are trademarks or registered trademarks of Netezza Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. All rights reserved. All other company, brand and product names contained herein may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders. Contacts: Ellen Rubin John Moran/Jason Morris Netezza Corp. Schwartz Communications, Inc. 508-665-6800 781-684-0770 erubin@netezza.com netezza@schwartz-pr.com Chris Dunakin Schwartz Communications, Inc. Prospect Place, 230 Third Avenue Waltham, Massachusetts 02154 Phone - 781-684-0770 Fax - 781-684-6500 E-mail - cdunakin@schwartz-pr.com |