HP's new Business Information Optimization unit's flagship product will be internally developed data warehousing technology, said Ben Barnes, the newly appointed vice president and general manager of the BI group.

Previously, Barnes was CEO for ActivIdentity Inc., an IT security vendor, and Intraspect Software, a collaboration and content management company. He also was general manager of IBM's global business intelligence solutions division, and was general manager for marketing at Teradata.

In addition to BI, the new unit will include an information management focus, with an emphasis on data archiving and data management.

HP began in October to ship its new data warehousing technology, NeoView. NeoView is made up of an HP fault-tolerant server and storage and database software, said John Miller, director of NeoView marketing at HP. It was developed to be used as part of an ongoing internal HP effort to consolidate more than 700 data marts into an enterprise data warehouse. Officials on Tuesday declined to name what companies other than HP itself are using NeoView.

NeoView is not only "a large, very scalable, very-high-performance data warehouse," said Barnes, noting that it also has "a very exciting price that puts it in the marketplace of some of the data warehousing appliance vendors."