"We look at Greenplum as the leader in terms of software-based solutions, and Netezza as the leader in hardware-based solutions," he said.

Hirsch declined to say how much he paid for the Greenplum and Netezza appliances. Greenplum has said it of user data, while about $29,000 per TB for its 10100 data appliance.

The NYSE is about to go live with a latency monitoring system that will plug into Greenplum and use Global Positioning System (GPS) signals to synchronize measured times within the network, for better precision and accuracy, as well as scale up to billions of rows of data per day while performing "near-real-time analysis."