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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 (12th), Hadoop (6th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (15th)
 

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

"We had a lot of POC's on a data warehousing project with the help of Netezza, we have proved that it has really improved time on doing analytics."
"The most valuable features of the IBM Netezza Performance Server are the NPS server because of the reduced maintenance and overall good performance."
"With a field-programmable gate array, it has the capabilities to do arithmetic calculations at memory level."
"The most valuable feature would be the fact that it has been running for awhile in an appliance format."
"The speed has been excellent for us, in pulling information, as well as the batch timing, and the suite of tools that comes with it for the ETL with IBM InfoSphere."
"The performance of the solution is its most valuable feature. The solution is easy to administer as well. It's very user-friendly. On the technical side, the architecture is simple to understand and you don't need too many administrators to handle the solution."
"We can process through more data much faster than we could with prior technologies."
"Those reports were improved from a couple of hours to minutes."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
"The real-time information is great."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW."
"Out-of-the-box reports are very useful."
"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."
"Technical support is good, and they were able to assist us in some specific issues we were experiencing."
 

Cons

"LIke Teradata, we can’t add a node/SPU to the existing appliance."
"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 scalability is not good. They claim it's scalable but it's not, especially in comparison with other solutions."
"Netezza has a single active host node that can become a performance bottleneck."
"The scalability is not as expected. The capacity in this black box is not enough."
"Stability comes and goes."
"It is not designed to process a huge volume of data."
"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."
"The big minuses are its not being user friendly."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution has a yearly licensing fee, and users have to pay extra for support."
"Expensive to maintain compared to other solutions."
"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 annual licensing fees are twenty-two percent of the product cost."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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."
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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
17%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise6
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 Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Oracle and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.