Sybase Taps HP for BI Reference Architecture

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Touting what it says is “significantly lower” total cost of ownership, Sybase has announced that its IQ 15 business intelligence (BI) software is now a reference architecture on HP ProLiant DL785 servers. The joint solution is designed to optimize query response and data loads, while reducing overhead, storage costs and maintenance requirements.

You could already buy HP servers and storage and add Sybase IQ 15. “But with the reference architecture you’re guaranteed to know what the price is going to be and the performance,” Dan Lahl, senior director of product marketing at Sybase, told InternetNews.com. “It’s the fastest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 TPCH benchmarkfor datawarehousing at one terabyte.”

Lahl said IQ 15 competes in a class of BI applications used by companies in industries like consumer packaged goods to figure out what the best bundles of products to sell to distributors are or to figure out the best way to optimize shelf space — “Anything where you have to look at a lot of data over time, say 12 months or longer, to get good trending results,” he said.

“Another example is a financial services firm that needs to identify fraud rates. You want to go back 12, 36 or 48 months to analyze that,” Lahl added. “Stock trading performance is another example; anywhere where you have to look at a lot of trades and transactions over time.”

Sybase said the HP/Sybase IQ 15 solution makes information more ready available with the ability to load large data feeds directly from clients. Also, availability and disaster recovery features are designed to ensure continuous availability of the analytics environment.

Lahl said the partnership with HP (NYSE: HPQ) is “a big deal for us, because we haven’t had reference architectures before like Oracle does, so it validates some of the market momentum and we think this will bring us a lot more business.”

The news comes just a few months after enterprise software giant — and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) rival — SAP (NYSE: SAP) announced its blockbuster purchase of Sybasefor $5.8 billion.

“As organizations adopt virtualization and cloud technologies the ability to integrate data becomes a key differentiator for business competitiveness,” Lorraine Bartlett, vice president of worldwide marketing, strategy and operations for Business Critical Systems at HP, said in a statement. “Together with Sybase, we are building solutions that will enable companies to meet the most demanding BI and analytics needs while driving growth and reducing total cost of ownership.”

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.