DATA WAREHOUSES/DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS GO MISSION-CRITICAL

According to a recent survey of data warehouse users conducted by Palo Alto Management Group, Inc. (PAMG), data warehouse/decision support based applications are rapidly becoming mission-critical. Respondents to the survey were presented with a list of nearly 25 system purchase criteria and asked to rate the importance of each one. Three out of the top five choices were items that are normally associated with "can't fail" applications.

PAMG Principal William Dollar stated, "Data Integrity, System Reliability and System Availability were rated significantly higher than such things as Cost of Ownership, Security and Performance. These ratings show conclusively that applications based on data warehouse technology are, in many cases, as critical to the health of an enterprise as are applications based on transaction-based technologies such as ERP and OLTP."

The survey, which was conducted in North America, Europe and Japan, showed that these results were relatively consistent across geographic regions. Said Dollar, "Issues such as customer retention, improving time to market, identifying new customers, reducing operations costs and staying ahead of the competition know no geographic boundaries.

"While American enterprises may be taking the lead on the development of many data warehouse based applications, enterprises in other countries are quick to adopt any technologies that can work to their economic benefit and understand that adopters of these technologies are likely to be among the only survivors.

"Mission-critical applications are only as viable as their weakest link. The hardware, the operating system, the DBMS, and all the backend and frontend tools must be equally robust. And this behavior must be maintained in an environment where the amount of data in the warehouse and the number of users accessing the data are growing exponentially."

Entitled "Data Solutions II," the study is based on 375 in-depth interviews conducted in North America, Europe and Japan, together with a unique forecasting model. The study is available from Palo Alto Management Group, Inc., a leading market research and consulting firm specializing in data warehousing and decision support markets. Documentation describing the study and a white paper may be found at http://www.pamg.com/dbsolutions