Shop Talk: Q&A With Jim Baum, Netezza Corp.
Photo/Christina H. Davis
Jim Baum, President and CEO, Netezza Corp.
If you’ve got terabytes of data and nothing to do with them, you might call Marlborough-based Netezza (pronounced Ne-Tease-Ah). The high tech company got its start in 2000 and reported nearly $188 million in annual revenues last year. Netezza’s bread and butter is supplying companies with high tech warehouses for their data and software to help interpret that data. If you’ve received coupons at the register of your favorite supermarket, chances are Netezza helped that store figure out what discounts you might appreciate. Here, Netezza’s president and CEO, Jim Baum, discusses the company’s technology and the difference between management and leadership.
>> How did you get to where you are today?
I started in 1989 at what was at the time a small software company called Parametric Technology Corp. (PTC). I stayed there for 11 years and the company grew to $1 billion in revenue over that period of time. I had wonderful sets of opportunities there to experience every facet of a technology business. I left PTC in 2000, and started at a very small company called Endeca in Cambridge, which was a really cool, hot startup in the enterprise information management world. I joined that company to partner with the founder and we built the business. And while I was at Endeca I actually knew the founder of this company, Jit Saxena, and he recruited me as part of a succession plan.
>> Can you describe in English what exactly it is that Netezza does?
We make a system of hardware and software that is used to allow people to analyze very large volumes of data. It fills a segment in the market typically referred to as the data warehouse segment. A data warehouse is a place where people bring collections of data from their business for the purpose of analyzing it.
>> I imagine there are still a lot of companies that aren’t dealing with their data at all. Do you find that?
You don’t find too many who aren’t dealing with it at all, especially larger companies because none of them can afford to. The market is too competitive for all of these guys. Even smaller companies who you would think wouldn’t have made a lot of investment here, some of them actually differentiate themselves by doing this better than their competition.
>> Do you see any opportunities in the move toward electronic medical records?
Absolutely. We have six strategic verticals that we focus on and health care is one of them. The big movement in the industry is electronic medical records and electronic medical record consolidation. There’s a lot of activity there. I think ultimately our role in that will be as a technology supplier to those companies who create the final set of applications and systems in the medical records environment.
>> How’s Netezza faired in the recession? Has the company been hit particularly hard?
In a sense I wouldn’t say we’ve been hit particularly hard. We’ve continued to show growth in our revenue results in this environment. Certainly the growth was not what it would be otherwise, but I think part of our value proposition is derived around reducing total cost of ownership while still improving performance. That’s a value proposition that plays pretty well in any economic environment. I will say that our selling pipeline and process has become far less predictable than it was. You see situations now where companies that would otherwise move forward with a project will make last minute decisions to not go forward or to delay for some period of time.
>> What’s been the most difficult lesson you’ve had to learn as a manager?
I don’t know if there’s one answer to that, there are so many… I could go on about this for hours, by the way. First, I think you need to fundamentally understand the difference between management and leadership. They’re not the same. I think management is about developing the processes and the metrics and the tactical structures and environments that you use to drive a given agenda. I think leadership is about passion and less about the specific details of management.
Watch as Jim Baum, Netezza's president and CEO, explains the company's data warehouse technology.
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