Data warehouse appliance maker Netezza is buying an enigmatic analytics firm based in North Carolina, NuTech Solutions.

Specifically what NuTech produces is rousingly vague based on its website. A few telephone calls later, and we only know they make extremely complex analytical programs that are — thanks guys — really hard to understand.

Netezza, meanwhile, is pleased about adding the firm's analytic voodoo to its own appliances. The company announced it would depend on that sort of technology back in September 2007, and the acquisition is meant to back up that vision.

NuTech says its customers include Ford, General Motors, Southwest Airlines, Procter & Gamble, NASA, the Polish Air Force Academy, NASDAQ, and some other big names. That's a pretty impressive list.

The company will continue to operate as an independent division of Netezza, according to the release.

Some of the technology described on NuTech's website seems pretty out there. Here are a couple confounding highlights:

They do "Fuzzy Systems," which "consist of a variety of concepts and techniques for representing and inferring knowledge that is imprecise, uncertain, or unreliable."

NuView also gets its kicks "...genetically breeding a population of computer programs using the principle of Darwinian natural selection and biologically inspired operations. To search the space of possible computer programs for the best one, a population of executable computer programs is created which compete against each other. The weak programs die and the strong programs reproduce to form a new generation of better programs."

Also, their logo is a Sierpiński triangle. Maybe that should have warned us we were jumping into the rabbit hole here. ®

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