META GROUP/DCI DATA WH WORLD & EXPO, PHOENIX, AZ REPORT 10.21.97 by Aaron Zornes, META Group D S *
The META Group/DCI 1997 Data Warehouse World conference in Phoenix drew
2,500+ attendees:
The audience reflected the diverse nature of applications targeted for data warehouse-style solutions. One third of attendees were executive or business management and 50%+ IT professionals (consistent with NYC 7/97). 300+ attendees completed the on-line survey conducted by Market Perspectives Inc. on behalf of and META Group and First Albany Corp.
Overall the market for data warehouse (DW) software, hardware and services will continue to grow at 40% annual compound rate through 1998 - from US$2.8B in 1996 to US$8B in 1998 (First Albany Corp./META Group estimates).
From an architectural standpoint, we are seeing continued rapid growth in data marts - growing from 51% of all DW architectures to 61% during 1997 (vs. 24% of all DWs during 1996). Operational data store is holding steady at 23-24% while centralized/enterprise DW is declining from 43% of current to 19% planned. Moreover, personal/mobile OLAP cubes will grow from 8% to over 21% of DWs planned.
The number of organizations building 1+ terabyte DWs will increase from 7% to 17% during 1997/98.
HP & Sun each held mindshare/marketshare at 35% & 24%; IBM SP2 held at 9% planned; NT increased from 43% planned to 57% (vs. 36% in 1996); NCR/Teradata, Tandem, Sequent, Pyramid & SGI held mindshare/marketshare at approximately <4% level.
The RDBMS market will also benefit significantly from DW as users expect to increase their investments by 38% during the next year. The number of high-end DW solutions (500 and 1,000+ seat user systems) will triple in the next months -- going from 6% of current to 26% of all DWs planned (vs. 12% in 1996).
The growth in RDBMS, OLAP and DSS per user licensing has significant positive implications for licensing revenues for suppliers (negative impact for users); but also a significant impact on IT support infrastructure (e.g., help desk, software distribution, etc.).
A summary of IT organizations' plans to purchase DW products was highlighted in the conference survey:
Prevalent Themes - "Data Marts," "Data Mining" and "Web-Enablement" were endemic themes at this conference. Announcements made at this conference included:
NCR and SAS Partnership - NCR will resell SAS products and integrate SAS Warehouse Administrator v1.2 with Teradata products
HP Open Warehouse Management Suite - Integration of systems management info (HP Open View) and performance metrics for query performance, DW availability and data currency
MS OLAP Server - Mr. Ballmer stated that mid-98 is expected shi date for MS OLAP Server (a.k.a. Project Plato/Panorama) and that it will be tied to release of MS SQL Server 7.0
Metadata Coalition Support for MS Active DW Framework - A translator will be made available between the coalition's Metadata Interchange Specification (MDIS) and the Microsoft Repository
Pine Cone - Version 2.0 of 4 core products (product tracker, user tracker, cost tracker, refreshment tracker); additional GUI and metrics; additional ports to NCR Teradata, IBM DB2 PE, and Red Brick
IA Corp. - InfoExtract to reengineer data from AFP formatted report streams
Data Mining - For the second time, DCI hosted a full day Data Mining Forum attracting 40+ attendees. Highlights included META Group's presentation of a survey of 125 production data mining sites and their macromining/micromining models, plus a presentation by GE Capital on use of SAS in large scale data mining and econometrics projects.
Microsoft - Other highlights of the conference included: Steve Ballmer (Sr. VP of MSFT) providing a cohesive view of MSFT's DW strategy for NT and related products (focusing on Excel and Access as the UI for OLAP), and Ralph Kimball raising security as a key issue of DW projects.
META Group analysts presented an "IT maturity organizational model" to assist users in determining appropriate usage of technologies and processes. The four categories include: "pre-historic" for stalled IT organizations who have outsourced most new development and maintenance, "post-past" for mainstream IT organizations, "pre-future" for early adopter IT organizations (i.e., looking at them today shows where "post-past" organizations will be in 12-24 months), and "sci-fi" for bleeding edge, extremely early adopter organizations.
Futures - Trends outlined for 1997/98 include a new emphasis on DW lifecycle maintenance and garbage collection such as identification and archival of little accessed elements. Also projected is an increased convergence of DW, data mining, and database marketing -- i.e., data mining is an overlay of the DW infrastructure and database marketing.
Bottom Line: IT focus has shifted from Enterprise DW cost justification to internal application delivery of data marts. As DWs expand dramatically in number of applications, users and size of database, they are increasingly becoming a strategic business initiative (vs. a secret weapon of the technology elite). Emphasis is being put on these business solutions: customer service, database marketing, supply chain planning, and quality management. For production DW, IT must budget the appropriate hardware and software dollars to support 150 GB+ data stores, with UNIX and NT being the predominant targets. Decision support workbenches should include both multi-dimensional-oriented tools (OLAP) for complex dimensional analysis as well as traditional tools with standard SQL access (managed query environments). IT organizations must also begin planning for both Web-enablement and data mining technology initiatives for deployment 12+ months out. Savvy IT managers should rightfully position DW initiatives as complementary to Y2K initiatives to avoid budget and staffing reductions.
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Aaron Zornes is executive vice president and service director for META Group's Application Delivery Strategies; email aaron.zornes@metagroup.com For more information, see http://www.metagroup.com