Kickfire's Cheap Data Mining

Business is drowning in data, and Bruce Armstrong could not be happier. "This is how multibillion-dollar companies get made," he says.

Armstrong is chief executive of Kickfire, a computer company in Santa Clara, Calif. that promises to turn pain into profit by analyzing the billions of clicks barreling through every connected company. It does so with cheap chips and free software, at a fraction of the cost that until recently companies paid for similar technology.

Thanks largely to the Internet, the world is creating something like a zettabyte of information every year. To get a sense of that number, start with a terabyte, which is the storage capacity of an amply endowed home PC or media center, and scale up from there by a factor of a billion.

Much of that data is ephemeral stuff like encryption algorithms and cat videos, but still there's the big business of analyzing online shopping behavior, video consumption, the placement of Web ads and the use of smartphones. That business takes in $1 billion a year and is growing at 40% annually.

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The competition is not asleep. Teradata now has a $56,000 appliance that handles a terabyte of data. Netezza, another vendor of data mining hardware, is looking to move into cheaper parts of the market. Oracle this year purchased Sun, which gives it both hardware and control of the open-source database software MySQL. Armstrong figures Oracle will keep MySQL healthy and free, since MySQL helps it take business from Microsoft.

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