Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

IBM Netezza Performance Server vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Netezza Performance Server
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (13th), Hadoop (6th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Shiv Subramaniam Koduvayur - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager at MAF Retail
Parallel data processing streamlines operations while cost and cloud integration challenge adoption
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only available in AWS, and in the Middle East, it is not well-developed in the Azure environment. For the cost to be reduced, it should match competitors. Many features need to be incorporated on the cloud.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Enterprise Architect at R2V2.ai
Have encountered complexity with programming language while working on large-scale data integration and have experienced improved governance and reporting
The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehouse, I would to see added features that simplify the product very well now. They are coming up with a terminology called SAP BDC where they are consolidating their tools, SAP Data Sphere for integration and SAP BW for the ETL and warehousing parts, and SAP Analytics Cloud. They are packaging these three features and calling it Business Data Cloud; they are fully coming on the cloud. We have to wait and watch; they have been speaking about BW/4HANA for quite some time now, but the customers or clients I work with are not finding great interest and it was seen as a candidate for evaluation. I have seen people looking at the latest technologies who are already on cloud who started building from scratch on cloud, such as Snowflake or Databricks, which can process very huge amounts of data and also address unstructured data, where SAP lags behind in cases where there is a need to bring in unstructured data. I have worked with SAP Data Intelligence, which earlier used to be called SAP Data Hub. The unstructured data is not greatly handled in SAP at this point in time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Data compression. It was relatively impressive; I think at some point we were getting 4:1 compression if not more."
"There is minimal on-going maintenance."
"Speed storage RAM all of which contribute to large capacity."
"The need for administration involvement is quite limited on the solution."
"Netezza is an easy-to-use data warehouse appliance; it's extremely fast with a low cost and the customers run their BI and advanced analytics in a very flexible manner."
"This is one of the most stable and fastest data warehouse appliances available in the market today."
"For me, as an end-user, everything that I do on the solution is simple, clear, and understandable."
"The need for administration involvement is quite limited on the solution."
"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."
"Now, because of the HANA integration, the hard disk and RAM are together, and because of that, the output is very quick and very fast actually."
"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."
"Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions."
"My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data."
"The key element in this solution is its rapid response. If you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two. That's the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
 

Cons

"Netezza is a costly solution. It does serve a specific purpose but it's costlier than what's available in the market, if you go to the cloud."
"Concurrency was an issue. If you run small queries it runs well, and the performance is good, however, when you run multiple long queries or multiple joins, it has some concurrency issues."
"Integration with XML is still not there for nzload utility."
"Technical support has been awful. I found them unwilling to help, and with direct VPN connection to systems, unwilling to actually connect and look at information, which is part of our contract."
"The only reason I wouldn't give it a 10 is because, early on, there were a couple of maintenance things that we had to do."
"The most valuable features of this solution are robustness and support."
"The Analytics feature should be simplified."
"I'm not sure of IBM's roadmap currently, as the solution is coming up on its end of life."
"I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least."
"There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product."
"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"For me, mainly, it reduces my costs. It's not only the appliance cost. There are also support costs and a maintenance costs. It does reduce the costs very drastically."
"The solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"Netezza is a costly solution. It does serve a specific purpose but it's costlier than what's available in the market, if you go to the cloud."
"Expensive to maintain compared to other solutions."
"The annual licensing fees are twenty-two percent of the product cost."
"The pricing is very expensive. It has a lot CPUs with a lot of components in it. It also has built-in redundancy for resiliency reasons."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"It's quite pricey. SAP changed its pricing policy, so they give you one engine and then you have to buy everything next to it, like MSS, the BPC licenses, and everything else."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"The licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse depends on your revenue. Its licensing structure is a little bit complicated. The more your revenue is, the higher the price, but SAP does have different pricing structures for various companies. For small businesses, licensing isn't based on revenue, but for big companies, it's revenue-based. There's some agreement regarding pricing for huge companies, so it's different, and SAP Business Warehouse pricing isn't fixed. On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating the licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse as five because it's very high. As your revenue grows, your licensing cost also increases, so you have to factor that in when calculating your cost."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Warehouse solutions are best for your needs.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user232068 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Aug 5, 2015
Netezza vs. Teradata
Original published at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/should-i-choose-net Two leading Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architectures for Data Warehousing (DW) are IBM PureData System for Analytics (formerly Netezza) and Teradata. I thought talking about the similarities and differences…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Performing Arts
5%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Retailer
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise33
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The cost of the solution is on the more expensive side, which is a concern for me. Additionally, its promotion and interaction with cloud applications are limited. The cloud version is only availab...
What advice do you have for others considering IBM Netezza Performance Server?
The solution has generally received positive feedback from me and is recommended for continued use by end users. However, the product cost is high compared to others in the market, and this cost ha...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?
The pricing for SAP Business Warehouse is on the expensive side. I am not sure about the current costing model as such. In my experience on cloud, I did not use BW HANA Cloud. I used the cloud prod...
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehou...
What is your primary use case for SAP Business Warehouse?
I am using SAP Business Warehouse in my organization for data warehousing as well as an ETL tool. Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward. Integration with SAP ER...
 

Also Known As

Netezza Performance Server, Netezza, Netezza Analytics
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Seattle Childrens Hospital, Carphone Warehouse, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Battelle, Start Today Co. Ltd., Kelley Blue Book, Trident Marketing, Elisa Corporation, Catalina Marketing, iBasis, Barnes & Noble, Qualcomm, MediaMath, Acxiom, iBasis, Foxwoods
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Netezza Performance Server vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.