Strengthening its toehold in data warehousing and business intelligence (BI), Hewlett Packard on Monday announced a major new customer for its Neoview data warehouse and new bundled risk solutions incorporating software from Informatica and Microstrategy. The news came just days after HP announced a new BI Maturity Model and companion online BI assessment.

Introduced earlier this year, Neoview is HP's appliance-based answer to large-scale data warehousing implementations, which will compete with the likes of Teradata, spun off as an independent company by NCR on October 1, as well as Oracle and IBM. The new Neoview customer is Rabobank Group of the Netherlands, which signed a $4.3 million deal including hardware, software and supporting services.

"HP Neoview exceeded our expectations in a testing stage and we expect the first implementation to deliver 10 to 20 times the performance we had with competitive offerings," stated Rik Op den Brouw, senior executive vice president, ICT, Rabobank.

No details were available on the size or Rabobank's deployment or the existing technologies to be displaced, but based on Neoview's entry price of $680,000 for a 6-terabyte system, the scale of the implementation is likely to be upwards of 30 terabytes.

HP also announced on Monday a new BI solution designed to help financial services organizations measure risk and improve compliance management processes. Built on Neoview, HP Enterprise Risk Management addresses Basel II, an international banking regulation. The integrated hardware and software also addresses aspects of regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and International Accounting Standards, but the next complete solution will address Know Your Customer Guidelines for licensed financial institutions. The solution includes a data model from UK-based solutions and consulting firm Quadrant Risk Management, ETL and data quality tools from Informatica, and reporting and analytic dashboards from Microstrategy.

"We've built all the dashboards necessary for Basel II reporting and understanding risk in the enterprise," says Geoffrey Burkholder, Director, Worldwide Business Intelligence Solutions, Financial Services Industries. "[We also] have a data certification component that tells the organization how that data can be used. In certain cases data is good for accounting and SEC reporting, but it's not suitable for marketing reporting or vice versa. Neoview is the platform that allows that data to be used by applications and users across the organization."

HP is intent on supporting its growing data warehousing and BI portfolio with consulting and integration services. Built on the Knightsbridge consulting business acquired last year, HP's Information Management Practice last week announced a BI Maturity Model designed to help organizations map progress in BI adoption in terms of business enablement, strategy and program management and information management. The models five stages of maturity are as follows:

1. Operations, in which organizations are focused on running the business,

2. Improvement, focusing on measuring and monitoring the business,

3. Alignment, focusing on integrating performance management and intelligence,

4. Empowerment, focusing on business innovation and people productivity,

5. Excellence, focusing on strategic agility and differentiation.

"Most organizations are struggling somewhere between stage two and stage three," says Valerie Logan, Worldwide leader, Consulting and Integration Information Management Practice. "As you get into stage three, many organizations start establishing BI competency centers, governance processes and master data management strategies."

As a companion to the Maturity Model, HP as developed an online Business Intelligence assessment said to offer a quick way to evaluate the focus of reporting and business analysis, driving factors behind current BI initiatives, strategies and management methodologies in use and business value derived. The survey is accessible on HP's Web site (registration required).