I am sitting at McCarran airport waiting to board my flight back from TDWI, and am thinking about one trend I noticed at the vendor exhibits: there is a growing set of vendors selling high-performance columnar-based database systems. Interestingly, the common denominator is the positioning of the software as a means for virtualizing a data warehouse appliance.
Orienting the data in a columnar manner is nicely suited to analytic applications, so the clear opportunities for these kinds of products are partnered solution providers for specific types of analytics, or with data aggregators and providers to allow for data linkage and then analysis.
Some of the vendors (or vendor reps) I bumped into over the past few days include ParAccel, Vertica, Sybase IQ, Infobright. Kognitio, alternatively, is not columnar but through data distribution across parallel systems can also talk the virtual appliance talk.
One conclusion that can be drawn is an emerging market for providing high performance analytics platforms with a low barrier to entry points towards cracking open that small.medium business market. One interesting thing to watch is the ways these guys will partner with other BI vendors (e.g., OLAP, visualization, end-user analytics) to see who can put together a robust end-to-end BI solution suitably priced for the $50-$100 million company.
Posted February 21, 2008 12:50 PM
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