Over the last year we all have seen a lot of information about the data warehouse appliance. Many authors including me have written, spoken and even implemented solutions with this technology. All of a sudden the noise over the appliance market has softened. why? is the appliance concept now legacy or has the hype died? The answer is neither. Data Warehouse Appliances are being adopted mainstream more than ever before..

The data warehouse appliance market is growing more bigger and there is a serious level of maturation in the space. Companies are now considering data warehouse appliances as mainstream platforms for developing and deploying data warehouse and business intelligence solutions. The vendors that have survived all the market swings over the last 12 months are now emerging with second, third and fourth generation offerings, and the bigger players have now solidified their presence in the appliance space with new offerings.

In my opinion the appliance is becoming a platform for deploying data and applications which are having either a short lifecycle and high complexity  in terms of business value or for deploying applications and data which have a longer lifecycle and lesser complexity in terms if business value.

Vendors such as Aster and Greenplum have propelled the incorporation of Mapreduce to make the platform more developer friendly. Vendors of interest to watch apart from these two and the big five (Netezza, Oracle, HP, Microsoft, IBM) are Infobright, ParAccel and Vertica. The last two are gaining more credibility and adoption, heralding the acceptance of Column Databases as mainstream analytical platforms, for faster analysis of large data volumes.

With so much going around, the Data Warehouse Appliance is certainly not dead and is not all hype. There is definitely substance in the technology and it continues to get better and bigger.

I'm writing this blog from an airplane and connected to the internet. While this is amazing and cool to be connected when being airborne, it also begs a question - Information Governance. We now live in a day and age of twitter and facebook; information sharing has reached new levels and information about anything, anywhere is always happening. Point in case, President Obama's remarks the other day was tweeted immediately and was turned into an instant debate of many dimensions. That information might have helped the people in the context of the conversation, but what about the rest of the world that just read the tweet?

Here is where information governance comes to play - when any information is deemed to be shared one must follow a set of guidelines, these may be as simple as

1. Classifying the content - Personal i.e share with friends and family; Professional - share with co-workers and others in your network; if you have information that is beneficial to others then you can write about it at hundreds of blogs

2. Identifying the context - When you share information on the web, set a context to what you will write about. Without context, any information can be interpreted in many dimensions. Doing this will save you and everyone else time

Public domain data such as twitter can be harmful if sensitive information is shared without rationale. This is one reason many organozations today restrict their webistes from accessing or providing access to social networks. Rather than completely shut access, which is controlled information governance, organizations must setup the office of an information Czar, who will provide guidance for sharable information. Any sensitive material can be restricted from being sent outside the organization.

Information governance is something that we all will learn to manage inour personal and professional  lives as we move into the next realm of information age and embrace social networking as a part of our life.

Analytics has been gaining a lot of attention in the last six plus months. The trend that we are seeing is across all areas products, consumers and services i.e we are seeing more products to address analytical BI, more companies are investing into analytical BI and more service offerings are being built on BI.

Why all this focus on analytics? the one answer that comes to mind is ease of use. But beyond that there are multiple factors enabling the analytical BI space

•  Computing platforms - Computing platforms were a big hinderance to analytics performing, which is a non issue, especially with the advent of data warehouse appliances. The lower cost of the platform and the speed of computing it provides has made the computing and availability of analytical data a non issue.
• Cause and Effect - Executive reporting has changed from plain stock graphs and speedometers to cause and effect analysis. Executives are more interested in Analytical BI, and seek more information than before
• Maturation of vendor offerings - The analytical reporting solutions have evolved over the last year
• Web 2.0 or BI 2.0 - The BI 2.0 effect has begun to change the way we do BI. Real time BI and Right time BI have created a great demand on Analytical BI solutions.
  

As we progress on this timeline, Analytical Solutions are going to become more powerful and easy to use.

The newest solution offfering in this space is from Kalido+Netezza called Kalido KONA Information Appliance. This is an end to end solution from Kalido for BI. Per information from Kalido, "The Kalido KONA Information Appliance addresses the discrete business requirements in specific industries, enabling enterprises to more effectively manage key performance indicators across all areas of business.  It is an end-to-end analytics and reporting solution containing industry-specific business information models and all required hardware and software for data storage, data sourcing and integration, master data management and governance, and analysis and presentation."

More information on this offering is available at www.kalido.com/KONA.