BI: The Year in Review

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) published recently, a retrospective called BI: The Year in Review, written by Stephen Swoyer, where he talks about what important happened in BI scenario, in his opinion.

I highlight in the article:

The DW appliance segment gained newfound legitimacy this year, too, thanks to interest from established powers, including Sybase Inc., Teradata Inc., and Oracle Corp., all of which launched dedicated DW systems.

This year might well be remembered as the year in which established DW and BI powers, DW appliance players, and analytics vendors maneuvered to address analytic issues of a new and almost staggering scale. Indeed, a growing desire to use analytic technology against ever-greater volumes of data, by ever-growing numbers of users, helped fuel much of the activity in the DW appliance segment, the traditional DW space, and the BI tools arena.

It was a year of surprising events, including acquisition activity (Microsoft buying DATAllegro), new product entries from non-traditional players (e.g., Sybase and Teradata), and partnerships between appliance vendors and BI players (e.g., Sybase and MicroStrategy; Dataupia and Tableau Software).

In September, Oracle announced its own DW appliance-like deliverable, the Oracle Database Machine, a combined hardware and software solution, sold by Oracle, serviced by Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP). The Oracle Database Machine is powered by a grid of Oracle database servers that distribute queries to Oracle’s HP-powered Exadata storage systems.

A more general response to the problem of making analytic technology more scalable and pervasive can be seen in the rise of specialty DW systems. In this respect, the irruption of upstart DW players, the ambitious expansion of Microsoft’s and Oracle’s DW efforts, and even Teradata’s long-awaited entry into the DW appliance segment are all responses to the same problem. 2008 was just the year in which this long-simmering need finally boiled over.

I think the BI scenario is shifting radically, with new concepts, tools and approaches. 2008 was a year with a lot of news about BI.