BI winners and losers - 2009 Predictions

Winners
1. SaaS (Software as a Service)
2. Cloud
3. Analytics

Loser
1. SOA

Backburner
1. MDM
2. Data Quality
3. Metadata

Have a look at the complete list here or summary here.

Amidst the current economic conditions, it makes sense for lower capital cost models like SaaS gain popularity and "luxuries" like MDM and Meta Data Management to be set aside for better days to come. While the benefits of MDM, DQ and Meta Data in the long run cannot be denied, a lot of management people I know are yet to become seers.

Another interesting factor to consider is the advent of open source tools atleast on the BI side if not on the ETL side. Companies who will consider tackling the "Cost" beast will find tools like BIRT promising and interesting. Atleast medium size companies might try it out.

Also making a part of the high level data available across the enterprise and building a "enterprise search" functionality is lacking in most BI tools / Implementations. Information Access tools like Endeca can target this market.

Now the combination of Open source, SaaS and Cloud is a very promising market yet to be taken up by consulting firms. Lack of "Open source" tool experts, the "convincing the management" process on cloud and SaaS is still going to be a hurdle to this option.

And then, with the economic depression looming, you never know!

Information Warehouse 1.0 - Final part

So now that we have seen about endeca and how it helps address some of our problems, lets come to the topic in hand. Information Warehouse. For those of us familiar with a data warehouse, this is a easy concept. Instead of dealing with data, we are going to handle the end product directly, thereby skipping a few steps and saving lots of money from the budget.

Yes, Information warehouse is presenting your data as Information directly to the end user from the source itself. Since Endeca allows for Information Integration and doesnt necessarily need conformance of different sources, this is easily achievable.

While Data Quality isssues like Cleansing and best practices like Master data Management still require physical Data integration, for a lot of companies who donot have the time or appetite to do it, Information warehouse should be a viable option.

Even for those of us who work in a data warehouse project and hear the end user complain everyday about the data he wants, Information warehouse can be the way to open up the data.

For those who still want to stand by Relational Databases and Architectures built on top of it, all I can say is, it is a dying breed. Dont believe me? Check out this MIT article which details why.

Here are a few features of RDBMS quoted to be used from 1970's

1. Disk oriented storage and indexing structures
2. Multithreading to hide latency
3. Locking-based concurrency control mechanisms
4. Log-based recovery

May be it is time to rethink the way we handle data. Start visualising the handling and access of data from today's technology perspective.

Maybe it is time we stopped building data warehouses without ability to give complete access to end users and start building information warehouses. After all, it is the Information that we care for!