Why are all the mega technology vendors suddenly so focused on next generation data warehousing and analytics?

Primarily, it's because Oracle wants to move down the information technology stack into what has traditionally been the realm of server and storage players. Today, more than a third of compute and storage demand is generated from traditional data warehousing and data mart implementations. HP, EMC, IBM and Sun/Oracle have been carving up this large and profitable market for the past 15 years, with each player generating billions in revenue.

In the last three months, however, Oracle has totally changed the game. Using IBM's age old bundling strategy, they have created a Data warehousing package (Exadata - dbase/Sun servers/Sun storage) that challenges the price and performance metrics that drive this market.

Despite outward appearances, this move is not offensive! It is, in fact, a defensive play against the success of Netezza Corporation, which has completely redefined the price/performance leadership benchmark for this space. The defensive strategy of bundling allows vendors to maximize performance on hardware blocks of compute and storage. This approach allows them to increase common parts and reduce bill of material (BOM) costs, thus producing less expensive offerings.

For EMC this poses a threat to a $2b data warehousing storage business that is extremely profitable. So the answer for them is go get compute capability, integrate it closely with storage and data management software and add Greenplum on top. Voila the EMC DW Appliance! Sounds good, right? Yes, from a performance and price perspective, but that still leaves a lot of questions (and customer requirements) unanswered.

• What are their BI/data analytics offerings? It's important to have a great engine, but without instrumentation one is prone to getting lost.

• How do they integrate unstructured content to provide the customer with a 360 degree view of their enterprise information? Will they try to integrate Centera or Celerra? Do they have a data connectors strategy?

• What about implementation services? Sounds like if you are a data warehousing services stand alone, your price just went up! Mr. Shirman, I suggest Glasshouse add DW services.

The real message here is that people want to get more out of their TB's and PB's of stored information. They have spent billions to store it, and now it is time to make it work. Today the leader in the space is Netezza — a great Attivio partner. Together, we provide the world's fastest, low cost DW/DA appliance in the market with integrated BI and unstructured data access.

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