Rating Enterprise Data Warehouse Platforms
| Gartner predicts that because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets |
Information technology professionals must “bet the business” in their Enterprise Data Warehouse decisions, costing millions of dollars in software, hardware and services, and which support mission-critical applications.
In a down economy, EDW, BI, and other IT budgets are under severe constraints, which reduce the viable options and raise stakes around decisions to commit to one EDW solution, service or vendor.
Forrester Research conducted an evaluation of leading enterprise data warehousing platform vendors and published its results to its members. The report, “The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms, Q1 2009”, helps IT professionals decode the strengths and weaknesses of the leading EDW platform vendors, across 54 criteria, for better decision-making.
The 54 criteria were grouped into 3 high-level buckets:
- Current offering – evaluated solution’s architectural and operational functionality to assess breadth and depth of vendor’s product set;
- Strategy – how each vendor plans to evolve its solution to meet emerging customer demands, and vendor’s go-to-market approach, commitment and direction strategies;
- Market Presence – evaluated each provider’s company financials, adoption, and partnerships.
The research found seven vendors met inclusion criteria with the following results.
Four top tier leaders: One-stop EDW shopping with strong scalability, flexibility and affordability
- Teradata, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft lead the pack because each offers nature, high-performance, flexible, secure and robust solutions.
- Teradata is tops in scalability, with its petrabyte-scale massively parallel platform.
- Oracle shows great progress in recent EDW appliance scale-out through an intelligent storage layer.
- IBM has the broadest range of EDW appliance packaging options.
- Microsoft has one of the most impressive mid-market focused EDW solution portfolios.
Three strong performers: Established vendors offer strong solutions for niche deployments
- Netezza demonstrates the most rapid evolution into a robust EDW platform, though the vendor’s data warehousing (DW) appliance primarily addresses tactical deployment for front-end online analytical processing (OLAP) acceleration.
- Sybase recently launched a family of cost-effective EDW appliances, with its core columnar database suited primarily for very large data marts.
- SAP’s NetWeaver BI platform offers a solid EDW hub capability for existing SAP users, but it aims to evolve into a more flexible platform for real-time business intelligence.
August update: Four of the top vendors released platform enhancements in last 3 weeks. Read on for details.
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