We did look at some other analytics platforms a few years back.

We are now looking at solutions due to scalability, such as: Db2 Warehouse, Exadata, Teradata, and Yellow Brick. Then, on the cloud side, we are considering Redshift and Snowflake.

My customer upgraded from Netezza 4.x to Twinfin 6.x.

No other options were looked at.

Yes, I evaluated Teradata and Exadata. Initially I thought that Teradata would be better, so my customer was not able to afford the costs. Now I am sure they made a good choice.

I compared Netezza to Teradata and Exadata.

Most shops I am in have used Oracle, Sql Server, or Teradata. Depending on what the data is being used for (OLTP, OLAP). OLAP is the best application for a Netezza server.

We are also doing a proof of value and proof of concept for AWS and Hadoop DXC.

We didn't really examine any alternatives. I started working directly on IBM PDA (Netezza) and I haven't had any chance to work on the competitors' products. I was not a decision maker in the selection of this product. This was a higher management decision.

A close competitor of IBM PDA is Apache Hadoop. As of now, no other product is as fast or as stable.

We also looked at Teradata.

We evaluated this and Greenplum. Netezza won the battle for being an appliance that is wholly supported by the vendor. Greenplum won the individual transaction battle, but it was not enough to overcome the ease of an appliance.

Before buying the physical product from IBM, there is an option to use the solution in the cloud to perform a POC and get your stats ready with actual data for better analysis of your investment.

No other solutions were looked at.

Vertica was one of them. I looked at it recently. It has limiting factors on things like updates and deletes of data, where it has performance issues. That's a big problem for us. 

We evaluated MS SQL server.

The in-house team and IBM consultants suggested the solution. There is a partnership between IBM and our corporation.