ParAccel, Inc. was a

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the ...

-based

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...

company. It provided a

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...

designed to provide advanced

analytics Analytics is the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. It is used for the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data. It also entails applying data patterns toward effective decision-making. It ...

for

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical pr ...

. ParAccel was acquired by

Actian Actian is a computer software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California that provides data management software. In July 2018, Actian was acquired by HCL Technologies and Sumeru Equity Partners for $330 million. On December 31, 2021, HCL Tec ...

in April 2013.

History

ParAccel was a venture-backed company focused on developing software for data analysis. It acquired some

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

from the company XPrime, which ended operations in 2005. It was officially incorporated in February 2006, founded by Barry Zane who became chief technology officer, Tom Clancey as interim-CEO, and was first funded by angel investors. In August 2006 the first series of

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to start-up company, startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth poten ...

came from Mohr Davidow Ventures, Bay Partners and Tao Venture Partners. In 2007 the company was based in

San Diego, California San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

, with an office in Ann Arbor, Michigan. David J. Ehrlich was chief executive, and Bruce Scott, vice president of engineering. In November 2007, a second round of $20 million included previous investors and was led by Walden Ventures. In December the company opened an office in

Cupertino, California Cupertino ( ) is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, directly west of San Jose on the western edge of the Santa Clara Valley with portions extending into the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. The population was 57, ...

(part of

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Count ...

). A third round of $22 million in June 2009 was led by

Menlo Ventures Menlo Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California with an additional office in San Francisco, California. The firm was founded as one of the earliest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley in 1976 and provides technology ...

. In January 2010 Mark Lockareff replaced Ehrlich as interim chief executive. In March 2010 the ''

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' listed ParAccel in a list of 50 top venture backed companies. A result from the TPC-H benchmark from the

Transaction Processing Performance Council In online transaction processing (OLTP), information systems typically facilitate and manage transaction-oriented applications. This is contrasted with online analytical processing. The term "transaction" can have two different meanings, both of wh ...

in April 2010 had record performance at 1 TB data size using

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

. Charles W. Berger was appointed chairman and CEO in September 2010. By early 2011 many of its competitors had been acquired. During its July 2011 funding round, existing investors were led by

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc. ( ) is an American multinational technology company focusing on e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It has been referred to as "one of the most influential econom ...

. In December 2012, the

Amazon Redshift Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse product which forms part of the larger cloud-computing platform Amazon Web Services. It is built on top of technology from the massive parallel processing (MPP) data warehouse company ParAccel (later acquire ...

database service was announced (and generally available in early 2013) using ParAccel technology. ParAccel was based in California with offices in Campbell and

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

. Competitors included

Greenplum Greenplum is a big data technology based on MPP architecture and the Postgres open source database technology. The technology was created by a company of the same name headquartered in San Mateo, California around 2005. Greenplum was acquire ...

(from Pivotal), EXASOL,

Vertica Vertica Systems is an analytic database management software company. Vertica was founded in 2005 by the database researcher Michael Stonebraker, with Andrew Palmer as the founding CEO. Ralph Breslauer and Christopher P. Lynch served as later ...

(from Hewlett-Packard),

Netezza IBM Netezza (pronounced ne-teez-a) is a subsidiary of American technology company IBM that designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, busine ...

(from IBM),

Oracle Corporation Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...

, and

Teradata Teradata Corporation is an American software company that provides cloud database and analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech a ...

(including its

Aster Data Systems Aster Data Systems was a data management and analysis software company headquartered in San Carlos, California. It was founded in 2005 and acquired by Teradata in 2011. History Aster Data was co-founded in 2005 by Stanford University graduate st ...

technology). ParAccel was acquired by

in April 2013. Berger left at that time to become CEO of

Extreme Networks Extreme Networks is an American networking company based in San Jose, California. Extreme Networks designs, develops, and manufactures wired and wireless network infrastructure equipment and develops the software for network management, policy, a ...

Products

In 2006 ParAccel offered two different products: Amigo and Maverick. Amigo was designed to accelerate queries directed at an existing data warehouse while leaving the data warehouse as the database of record. In contrast Maverick was designed as a stand-alone data store. ParAccel discontinued Amigo in favor of the stand-alone offering which evolved into the ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB). The ParAccel Analytic Database was a parallel relational database system using a

shared-nothing architecture A shared-nothing architecture (SN) is a distributed computing architecture in which each update request is satisfied by a single node (processor/memory/storage unit) in a computer cluster. The intent is to eliminate contention among nodes. Nodes do ...

with a columnar orientation, adaptive compression, memory-centric design. ParAccel's DBMS engine is built for analytics, initially based on

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

. ParAccel began phasing in a new optimizer (Omne) in release 2.0 and made significant changes to Omne in subsequent releases (3.1 released in June 2011). ParAccel implements compiled queries, and a proprietary interconnect protocol for inter-node communications. ParAccel offered on-demand integration (ODI) modules for analytics and data outside of the ParAccel Analytic Platform.

References

External links

* {{official website, http://www.paraccel.com/ Business intelligence companies Data warehousing products Software companies based in California Software companies of the United States