The Future of Data Warehousing

Gartner, Inc. has revealed its five predictions for business intelligence (BI) between 2009-2012. Analysts’ predictions ranged from the impact of business units exerting greater control over analytic applications to the effect of the economic crisis and how it will force a renewed focus on information trust and transparency to innovations such as collaborative decision making and trusted data providers. 

·       Through 2012, more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets
The economic downturn forces businesses to be aware of changes in their organisations, re-think their strategies and operating plans and face demands from stakeholders and governments for greater transparency about finances, operations, decisions and core performance metrics.....

·       By 2012, business units will control at least 40 per cent of the total budget for BI
Although IT organisations excel at building BI infrastructure, business users have lost confidence in the ability of them to deliver the information they need to make decisions.....Business units will increase spending on packaged analytic applications, including corporate performance management (CPM), online marketing analytics and predictive analytics that optimise processes, not just report on them.

·       By 2010, 20 per cent of organisations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software as a service (SaaS) as a standard component of their BI portfolio
Information aggregators will increasingly rely on SaaS to deliver domain specific analytic applications built from industry data they collect and shift the balance of power in the BI platform market in their favour....
 

·        In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with BI Platform capabilities
The emergence of social software presents an opportunity for savvy IT leaders to exploit the groundswell of interest in informal collaboration. Instead of promoting a formal, top-down decision-making initiative, these IT leaders will tap people's natural inclination to use social software to collaborate and make decisions.

·       By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through coarse-grained application mashups
Businesses should not trust their megavendor to solve all their integration problems. Vendors move slowly to integrate the disparate code bases they have acquired. Reliance on one vendor also limits the ability to use best-of-breed capabilities and weakens the buyer's negotiating position....

See: "Gartner Reveals Five Business Intelligence Predictions for 2009 and Beyond," Jan. 15, 2009.  For more information: “Predicts 2009: Business Intelligence and Performance Management Will Deliver Greater Business Value”, available on Gartner’s website.

BLADE's High-Speed,  Low Latency Networking Chosen for New Netezza Twinfin Data Warehousing Platform

Netezza chose BLADE’s RackSwitch and BNT embedded blade switches as the industry’s best network building blocks for the new TwinFin system architecture,.  This "best-of-breed," standards-based solution offers advantages that include:

• BLADE’s combined top-of-rack and embedded blade switching environment provides the fastest end-to-end data fabric infrastructure available for data warehousing and analytics.
• BLADE’s RackSwitch G8124 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch provides the essential high-speed, low-latency fabric for data-intensive networking at the rack level.
• BLADE’s BNT 1/10Gb Uplink Ethernet Switch for IBM BladeCenter provides the best option for delivering the high throughput required for data warehousing and analytics.
• BLADE’s RackSwitch G8000 provides a highly reliable management network at one third the cost of other Gigabit Ethernet switches.

The administrator-friendly BLADEHarmony management interface common to BLADE’s top-of-rack and blade server network environments provides operational efficiencies and enhances reliability.

Through the high-speed data fabric delivered by BLADE’s G8124 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch coupled with BLADE’s BNT 1/10G Uplink Ethernet Switch Module for IBM BladeCenter, the Netezza TwinFin appliance delivers orders of magnitude faster performance, fast load speeds of up to 2 terabtyes/hour and fast backup and restore rates of as high as 4 terabtyes/hour. Netezza’s hallmark performance is achieved through its patented software streaming architecture and a set of database accelerator cards that are seamlessly integrated with industry-standard blade servers combined with BLADE’s high-speed, low-latency networking and common BLADEHarmony management framework.

About Netezza Twinfin Data Warehousing & Analytic Appliance

The Netezza TwinFin is a purpose-built, standards-based data appliance that architecturally integrates database, server and storage into a single, easy to manage system. The Netezza TwinFin appliance is designed for rapid analysis of data volumes scaling into the petabytes, delivering 10-100x performance improvements at a fraction of the cost of other options available from traditional database vendors.  Download a PDF