REPORT ON THE ORLANDO DATA WAREHOUSE WORLD
by Aaron Zornes, META Group

Following is the complete Trip Report from the Data Warehouse World in Orlando that took place March 17-19, from Aaron Zornes of META Group. If you would like to speak with Aaron please contact Kent Streeb at 650/425-2424 or ( Kent.Streeb@metagroup.com ).

---

Data Warehouse World TRIP REPORT
1998 META Group, Inc.
META Group/DCI Data Warehouse World & Expo
Orlando, Florida March 17-19, 1998

The META Group/DCI 1998 Data Warehouse World conference in Orlando drew 1,600+ attendees:

• 700+ conference attendees
• 700+ exhibition program attendees
• 35+ trade press
• 90+ speakers
• 375+ exhibitor staff (representing 85+ vendors)

The audience reflected the diverse nature of applications targeted for data warehouse-style solutions. Forty percent of attendees were executive or business management and 50%+ IT professionals (consistent with DW Worlds held 2H97) 75% are in corporate IT groups; 25% in lines-of-business IT group. 125+ attendees completed the on-line survey conducted by Market Perspectives Inc. on behalf of 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 1998/99 (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 1TB+ DWs will increase from 7% to 17% during 1998/99.
• 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 high-level contrast of centralized/enterprise DW platforms vs. data mart platforms:

     Hardware            Hardware

     10% Compaq          12%  Compaq
      4% Digital          0%  Digital
     19% HP              24%  HP
     10% IBM M/F         10%  IBM M/F
      4% IBM RS/6000      4%  IBM RS/6000
     11% IBM SP2          6%  IBM SP2
      4% NCR              2%  NCR
     14% Sun             14%  Sun


     O/S            O/S

     29% NT         33%  NT
     51% Unix       49%  Unix


     RDBMS               RDBMS

     52% Oracle          43%  Oracle
     31% MS SQL Server   33%  MS SQL Server
      7% Informix        10%  Informix
     15% DB2 family      12%  DB2 Family
      7% Sybase IQ        8%  Sybase

Year 2000 (Y2K) Impact

This survey showed that In Progress DW projects are not currently threatened to any major degree by Y2K funding/staffing issues. However, the minority that reported staffing/budget reductions of approximately 10-15% should plan accordingly. While 66% foresee no impact (same as all respondents in 1997!), 14% reduced DW staffing, and 7% reduced hardware and software budgets, surprisingly 11% are experiencing accelerated DW projects as a result of Y2K. Additionally, 9% have their focus from Enterprise/Centralized DWs towards Data Marts. Although, these percentages have held steady now for one calendar year we believe there will a major fire drill during 1998/99 which will drain significant COBOL and database talent off all IT projects to deal with the pending Y2K triage efforts.

Prevalent Themes/Announcements Data Marts, Data Mining and Web-Enablement were endemic themes at this conference. Announcements made at this conference included:

• There was ongoing guru/consultant skirmishes over the religious issue of architecture. Bill Inmon introduced his relatively new concept of exploration DWs. META Group's John Ladley promoted the pragmatic view of information logistics i.e., back off to 50,000 feet and ignore formulaic solutions; while making a conscious effort to map appropriate mix and match of components to your business.
• Data mart applications for application packages. Numerous vendors were promoting pre-packaged data mart applications for SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, et al; additional both Lawson and Hyperion were demonstrating their corporate score cards capability, the Hyperion demo actually running against the son-to-be-released MS OLAP Server product.
• Ken Orr advised that Y2K is becoming a raging area of debate of bane vs. boom with his view it DW will help Y2K.
• META Group advised IT organizations to focus less on technical merits of OLAP and more on business functionality along the way introducing business performance management as a new term for DSS, EIS and business intelligence.
• There was a significant increased emphasis on becoming more real-time in data fresh rates for DWs:
  • 29% weekly (vs. CY97 15%)
    
  • 26% monthly (vs. CY97 70%)
    
  • 25% daily (vs. CY97 15%)
• The top three cleansing issues cited by the survey participants were:
  • 43% detecting missing data
  • 30% developing cleansing/transformation rules
  • 25% merging/consolidating data sources
• Vendor announcements at this conference included:
  • Platinum acquisition of LogicWorks
  • Brio & Ardent (VMark) announced integrated metadata solution
  • NCR integrating Cognos tools into its vertical industry DW solutions
  • Sun promoting Java via certified Teleran's 100% pure Java adaptive DW mgmt system
  • CrossZ became QueryObjects
  • DataMind left data mining market to go into database marketing and call center support systems
  • Information Advantage add'tl Security, user profiling and data integrity via Decisionsuite workbenches plus Decisionsuite tightly integrated with
  • ERwin data modeling tool

Center for DW Excellence

Concurrent with DW World, DCI hosted for the first time The Center for DW Excellence with conference chairman Claudia Imhoff. This parallel conference addressed the more advanced technical issues and was well attended.

Futures Trends outlined for 1998/99include 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: 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 6-12 months out.

Vendors are still scrapping to produce better metadata integration, web-enablement while data mining is backing off from discrete technology to more of an embedded capability. Hot demand continues for application package-specific data marts. User DW emphasis is being put on business solutions such as customer service, database marketing, supply chain logistics, and quality management. IT focus continues to shift towards data marts over centralized DWs with weekly/daily refresh more common than monthly. While DW investments are not (currently) at risk due to Y2K, savvy IT managers should rightfully position DW initiatives as complementary to Y2K initiatives to avoid budget and staffing reductions.

For more information see http://www.metagroup.com/