Framingham, Mass. — June 5, 2007 — Netezza Corporation, a leading provider of data warehouse appliances, today announced that Michaels Stores, Inc., has chosen the Netezza Performance Server® (NPS®) system as its enterprise data warehouse. Michaels Stores will use Netezza to support merchandising, supply chain, planning, finance, human resources and executive reporting and analytics across its 900 stores in the U.S. and Canada.

Michaels Stores, Inc. consists of Michaels craft stores, Aaron Brothers stores, four Star Decorators Wholesale stores and its Artistree frame manufacturing operation. Michaels Stores’ previous data warehouse solution couldn’t support the exponential growth of its data or provide the detailed analytics it required. With nearly seven terabytes of data in the system, Michaels Stores expected to double its data within a year and knew that, with the incumbent system’s slow query response time and difficulty handling mixed workloads, it could not handle the increased demand. Michaels Stores turned to Netezza for a simple, high-performance solution that would allow it to manage the influx of data quickly and enable transaction-level, detailed reporting.

“Before Netezza, we were not confident that our existing data warehouse system would keep up with our increased demand for more detailed analytics and data,” said Mike Jones, CIO at Michaels Stores, Inc. “Since implementing Netezza as our EDW, we are now running up to 22,000 queries each day, with over 600 users accessing the system. With Netezza we will be able to run complex analyses by product, store and date, as well as leverage new analytics against transaction-level data, including market basket analyses.”

“Leading retailers like Michaels Stores continue to choose Netezza as their enterprise data warehouse. Netezza’s high performance, low cost and ability to handle very large, complex mixed workloads have been key to our success in retail,” said Andy Winans, vice president, Retail & CPG, Netezza. “Using Netezza, our customers can really put their data to work.”

The Netezza Performance Server system is built specifically to analyze terabytes of detailed data 10-100 times faster than existing data warehouse options, at a much lower total cost of ownership. The NPS system stores, filters and processes terabytes of records within a single unit, analyzing only the relevant information for each query, enabling improved query performance for customers like Michaels Stores.

About Michaels Stores
Michaels Stores Inc. (michaels.com) is the largest specialty retailer of arts and crafts. With more than 900 stores in the United States and Canada, the company carries a wide selection of products in arts, crafts, framing, floral, home décor and seasonal merchandise. Michaels also operates specialty stores under different brand names including Aaron Brothers, Recollections and Star Decorators Wholesale.

About Netezza Corporation
Netezza is a leading provider of data warehouse appliances. The Netezza Performance Server data warehouse appliance integrates database, server and storage platforms in a purpose-built system to perform detailed queries and analyses on large volumes of stored data. Recognizing the limitations of traditional data warehouse solutions, Netezza designed its NPS family of data warehouse appliances specifically for analysis of terabytes of data 10-100 times faster than traditional solutions, with a lower total cost of ownership and greater ease of use. Based in Framingham, Mass., Netezza has offices in Washington, DC, the United Kingdom and Asia Pacific. The Company is backed by leading venture capital firms, including Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures, Battery Ventures, Orange, Sequoia Capital and Meritech Capital Partners. For more information about Netezza, please visit www.netezza.com.

# # #

Follow this link for more information on Netezza data warehouses.