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Blog: Jill Dyche

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Data Warehouse Appliances Ridin' High!

In which Jill—holding firm on her “the platform doesn’t matter” take on BI—has to admit that when it comes to data warehouse appliances, there might indeed be more cowboy than hat.

Whenever my schedule permits I like to host podcasts for our friends at BI Network. I’ve talked with many of the network’s vendors and sponsors on the record. (I’m extremely ambivalent about the fact that I sound like my sister on podcasts. Heredity’s a sunovabich.) Anyway at the last TDWI conference I hosted podcasts with Microsoft, Teleran, Syncsort, and data warehouse appliance vendors Paraccel and DATAllegro.

I'm excited about the data warehouse market in general, and DATAllegro was announcing its new grid-enabled data warehouse appliance at the conference, and had a cowboy-themed booth with a John Wayne mug shot and the requisite Western garb. In discussing his company’s latest product announcement, DATAllegro CEO Stuart Frost said something intriguing. He claimed that appliance technologies can actually encourage business-IT alignment.

Given that I teach a full-day course on business-IT alignment for BI, in which I claim that the processing platform doesn’t matter, I leaned forward in my chair and my chin hit the mike, so when you hear a little “bump” in the podcast, you’ll know where it came from.

"New grid-enabled DW appliance technologies enable large corporations to build highly scalable hub-and-spoke data warehouse architectures,” Stuart explained. “What this means is that business units can purchase independent data mart appliances (spokes) to meet their own budgets and SLAs, while central IT can take care of corporate data governance and management on an enterprise-class hub appliance.” (Stuart was dressed as a cowboy when he said this, but the fact that he was implying specific organizational ownership delineation as a result of data warehouse appliance adoption kept my attention focused.)

“This 'best of both worlds' approach decreases the tension between business units and corporate IT that can often arise with traditional centralized data warehouse technologies." Hmm. Business accountability of data in the context of business requirements. Sounds like a familiar admonishment by yours truly. Perhaps the data warehouse appliance is a cheaper, faster way to not only process and deploy larger data volumes, but deliver data to different constituencies based on ownership and usage context. In which case, Yee-haw!

Technorati tags: data warehouse applicances, DATAllegro, BI from Both Sides, business-IT alignment

  Posted by Jill Dyche on October 8, 2007 8:47 PM |

Comments

Jill - Great post. Wouldn't it be ironic if technologies emerged that actually allowed technology itself to fade into the background, with people coming into the foreground? Of course it would change the power dynamic between IT and BIZ. But since we are all on the same team after all, who really cares as long as we become a more effective organization? If the advent of cheap/fast/easy storage appliances makes the storage/access of data a pedestrian consideration (as opposed to the dark art it is today), then perhaps we can see a new operating model evolve in which IT manages the core sources of facts without hand-cuffing the business' application of those facts. Now that would be cool.

http://circaspecting.typepad.com/circaspecting_musings_on_/2007/09/facts-are-not-t.html

Posted by: Scott Davis | October 15, 2007 1:14 PM

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