Abundant buzz surrounded the Netezza
Netezza develops so-called data warehouse appliances, which help analyze huge volumes of data to provide companies better insight on important trends. Last year, revenue surged 48% to $79.6 million. Even the company's loss of $7.9 million was nonetheless an improvement from its $13.8 million loss in 2005.
In competition with 400-pound gorillas such as EMC
The company faces a big market opportunity. According to IDC, the data warehouse management software segment was $4 billion in 2005, and it's expected to grow to $6.3 billion by 2010.
Netezza is trading at about 12 times revenue -- a reasonable level, compared to other networking highfliers such as Riverbed Technologies
But I'm still concerned about the competitive environment. It appears that IBM, Oracle and HP are revving up their data-warehousing offerings. And with its spinoff from NCR
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Fool contributor Tom Taulli, author of The Complete M&A Handbook, does not own shares mentioned in this article. He is currently ranked 2,109 out of more than 60,000 participants in CAPS.