Netezza started life as Intelligent Data Engines, a name that said exactly what it built. The Massachusetts company sold a single machine that combined the database, the servers and the storage, tuned to answer big questions about big piles of data. Companies wheeled it in and plugged it in. By the spring of 2007 Netezza had sold more than 230 of these appliances to 101 customers, and it went public that July.

Hardware for Hard Questions

Jit Saxena and Foster Hinshaw founded the company in August 2000, and it took the name Netezza that November. Large companies stored years of sales, calls and transactions in data warehouses, but asking those systems a complex question could take hours. Netezza's appliance pushed much of the work down into custom hardware close to the disks. The bet was that buyers would trade the flexibility of mixing parts from several vendors for a box that was faster, cheaper to run and simple to set up.

Bought by Big Blue

Netezza priced at $12 a share in July 2007 and listed on NYSE Arca under NZ. The company kept growing through the financial crisis as businesses collected more data than ever. In September 2010 IBM agreed to buy Netezza for $27 a share in cash, more than double the offering price, in a deal valued at about $1.7 billion. The sale closed that November, and IBM sold the product under its own name.

Cover: Barn—Lake George, Alfred Stieglitz. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a barn (a warehouse for data).