We Keep Databases Running. Then We Make Them Smarter.
If you’ve visited our website recently, you’ll notice things look a little different. We’ve rebuilt it from the ground up. Not just a fresh coat of paint, but a complete rethink of how we present who we are and where we’re going.
Netezza, Stronger Than Ever
Let’s get this out of the way first: we are not moving away from Netezza. Quite the opposite.
Over the past year we’ve actually expanded our Netezza capabilities significantly. NZ Controller gives customers a hardened, remotely managed Netezza appliance with full RHEL security hardening and ODBC/JDBC-only external access. Our Smart Management Frameworks now have a modern GUI for system health monitoring and operations. And we’ve extended our support offering to cover Cloud Pak for Data, so whether you’re running a legacy Twinfin, a Mako, a Hammerhead, or NPS on CP4D, we have you covered.
Our engineers supported the Netezza platform before IBM even acquired it. We were here before IBM, and we’re still here now that IBM has walked away from legacy support. That commitment isn’t changing.
Our Customers Are Taking Us on a Journey
What is changing is where our customers are taking us.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve had an increasing number of conversations that go something like this: “We love what you’ve done with our Netezza environment. We’re also running PostgreSQL now, and we’ve got data in Databricks. Can you bring that same engineering depth to those platforms too?”
When your customers ask you to come with them on a journey, you listen. And you go.
Some of our customers are migrating off Netezza entirely. Others are running hybrid environments where Netezza sits alongside newer platforms. A few are exploring machine learning for the first time and want a partner they trust to guide them through it. In every case, they’re asking for the same thing: the engineering rigour and deep platform knowledge that Smart Associates has always delivered, applied to wherever their data lives now.
Three Pillars of Database Engineering
The new website is structured around three pillars. These aren’t a reinvention; they’re a recognition of what we’ve been doing for our customers and where they’re asking us to go next.
Pillar 1: Database Support and Platform Longevity. This is our foundation and it’s stronger than ever. Expert break/fix and managed support for IBM Netezza across the full range of hardware, plus new tools like NZ Controller and enhanced Smart Management Frameworks that give customers better visibility and control than they’ve ever had. If your Netezza system is past its IBM End of Support date, we’re the people who keep it running safely and effectively.
Pillar 2: Database Governance and Observability. Our automation tools for replication, access control, system health, and data quality have grown well beyond Netezza. Smart Data Frameworks now handles cross-platform replication and migration. Smart Access Control synchronises Entra ID and LDAP permissions. These are tools our own engineers use in client environments every week, and they work across Netezza, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and more.
Pillar 3: Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning. This is where it gets exciting. We’re building Feature Factory, an ML platform designed to turn your existing data warehouse into a production machine learning environment. Automated feature engineering, model training, scoring, and governance, all running inside your database with no data movement. It will be available for Netezza first, with PostgreSQL, Greenplum, Cloudberry, and Databricks on the roadmap. Which platform comes next will be driven directly by demand from our waitlist, so if you want to influence the priority, sign up and tell us what you’re running. Our customers have the data. We’re building the tools to help them do something genuinely intelligent with it.
Where We’re Going
The website is a milestone, not a destination. Over the coming months you’ll see Feature Factory progressing towards release, new integrations for our governance tools, and more of the technical content that our customers tell us they value. We also have some exciting announcements coming about our approach to software licensing that we think the community will welcome. Watch this space.
There’s a broader principle at work here too. Our customers brought us on this journey, and we want them to keep shaping it. Which platforms we support next, which features we prioritise, which problems we solve first: these decisions should be driven by the people who actually use our tools, not by what we think the market wants from a boardroom. That’s why the Feature Factory waitlist asks what platform you’re running. It’s why we’re investing in our newsletter, knowledge base, and resources.
We’ve been keeping databases running for over twenty years. Our customers are now asking us to make them smarter, and that’s exactly what we intend to do.
Get in touch if you’d like to talk about your database challenges, whether that’s keeping a legacy system alive, governing data across platforms, or exploring what machine learning can do with the data you already have.
