IBM ran into an interesting problem last quarter. It had a product so popular, that it literally ran out of stock. But that won't stop it from releasing the umpteenth new version of it tomorrow.

The product goes by the tongue-twisting name of the Netezza Customer Intelligence Appliance and IBM's strategy has been to release about 100 individual versions of the product, geared for specific industries. Tomorrow, IBM will release a version for the retail industry and trot out an early user, Bass Pro Shops, the company told Business Insider.

IBM's Netezza business grew 70 percent in the fourth quarter and on last week's Q4 analyst call, IBM's CFO Mark Loughridge was forced to admit that its success took the company by surprise. IBM  "ran out of boxes" in the quarter he said.

Netezza Customer Intelligence Appliance is one of those "big data" products that helps enterprises analyze massive amounts of data on the fly. As an in-memory analytics appliance, it competes with SAP's HANA and Oracle's Oracle Exadata.

Its claim to fame is that it can sift through petabytes of data in data in minutes. A petabyte is one quadrillion bytes. Just to give some context, the appliance can analyze in minutes almost half of what the average human brain will store in a lifetime.

It's a good thing IBM is killing it with Netezza, too. The company forked out $1.78 billion for the company in 2010.

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