Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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March 14, 2007

IBM Dynamic Warehousing: Just Marketing Spin?

IBM announced today the third generation of their Business Intelligence strategy. IBM outlines the generations as:

- query/reporting, followed by...
- online analytical processing (OLAP), and now...
- dynamic warehousing

According to Marc Andrews, IBM Director of Data Warehousing, dynamic warehousing is "about leveraging information on demand to optimize every transaction to make real-time business decisions" as stated in a ComputerWorld article. It is described as "makes the analysis of data stored in its data warehouse part of a business process".
A whitepaper is available from IBM.

So, what?

I read the whitepaper carefully and with the expectation of finding new concepts hidden within dynamic warehousing. Sadly I was disappointed. It was well written but a jumble of good concepts that do not go anywhere. I agree with the overall intent, but it is now so past session. It reminds me of the early positioning papers on active data warehousing by Teradata about five years ago. Worst, it hinted that the driving force behind the whitepaper was to make sense of a bunch of products, rather than mapping out a viable business solution. In other words, my feeling from reading this whitepaper is that dynamic warehousing is just marketing spin on some key but old concepts.

I expect more from IBM. They correctly pointed out that the hot issues are:

- complex data integration (as ALWAYS),
- increased data volume/variety (HELP, I am drowning)
- timely data (I mean NOW)

But then, IBM did not show how their strategy of dynamic warehousing offer an innovative approach to solve these real problems.

I will be closely watching the evolution of dynamic warehousing by IBM. Let's see if this horse has legs, now that it stumbled out of the gate. The race is not over!

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