Netezza competes against the likes of Teradata - soon to spin out from NCR - and Oracle, IBM and HP in the data warehousing realm. These companies all have products for collecting and analyzing huge amounts of information to give retailers, banks, manufactures and others a better grasp on their businesses. Wal-Mart and Dell, both Teradata customers, stand out as two, well-known advocates of data warehousing technology, using their systems for maximum supply chain efficiency. Founded in 2000, Netezza has adopted the appliance model with its products. This means that it hopes to create easy-to-use systems that combine hardware and software for the singular purpose of data warehousing. The Netezza Performance Server can apparently beat rivals because of its Intelligent Query Streaming design. "Netezza has placed processing power next to the data, so data analysis occurs at the source at streaming speeds, delivering an unprecedented boost in performance," the company claims.