Scott , Greenplum1

San Mateo - CA United States

The big idea: In 25 words or less, please tell us how this Fast 50 Nominee is helping to address the planet's problems.

Greenplum is focused on creating business intelligence and data warehousing solutions that dramatically improve a company’s ability to analyze its data for competitive advantage.

Please describe how this nominee is using business as a force of positive change. What technology, idea, or strategy is the nominee using -- and what problem, such as global warming, poverty, or pollution, does it address? (suggested length: 100 words)

Technology has sparked a revolution in information. Businesses in every industry across the globe have been impacted by an avalanche of "networked information" – whether that's order data moving electronically from supplier to vendor; healthcare data moving from physician to patient to insurance company; or social networking data moving from one member to another. With the rise of the Internet, most companies are collecting a thousand times more data than they did just a few years ago. Harnessing this mountain of data has become one of the biggest challenges for organizations. In fact, most companies can hardly process and store all this data, let alone analyze it to find out patterns and trends that would help them improve their business and boost profits.

But it is increasingly clear that data can be a substantial corporate asset if used well, which is why companies are rushing to embrace complex analytics and business intelligence applications to make sense of their data. Some of these companies are able to gain substantial competitive advantage or process improvements from the intelligence they gain from their data – even though many of the data analysis tools are still too hard to use. Some examples of smart data analysis include revenue and capacity planning for airlines; hypertargeting of advertising to members of a social network; the ability to quickly locate and stop fraudulent activities such as bogus stock trading or telco bandwidth misuse.

Greenplum is a data infrastructure company helping companies work smarter, faster and better. We understand the challenges of massive data management and are working to provide lower cost solutions based on commodity hardware, open source software and open standards. The Greenplum Database is being developed with customers’ business goals in mind, because Greenplum engineers know that massive improvements in speed, flexibility and capacity of a customer's data warehouse have a huge impact on their ability to succeed and be profitable in today's global marketplace.

What are the results, both financial and social? How has the nominee's business performed, and what impact has it had on the problem it addresses? (suggested length: 100 words)

Greenplum is experiencing rapid growth in its bookings, revenue and customer base. The company recently raised $27M in a second funding round from Meritech, SAP Ventures and Sun. Greenplum is using this capital to invest in professional services, engineering and sales, in order to expand into new markets, enhance products and ensure customer success in using the Greenplum Database. Customers in a range of industries, including financial services, Internet services and telecom, are all experiencing substantial improvements in their competitive capabilities by managing and analyzing their vast stores of customer-generated data with Greenplum.

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