The BI vendor market has become an imbalanced space. There is either consolidation leading to BIG behemoths or you have extremely niche startups or the last choice Open Source. What this leads to is confusion in user organizations.

With market consolidation, companies are left with a mixed bag of solutions and now need to reassess their investments, new market offerings have not reached enough maturity and open source is not accepted yet as enterprise capable in BI. Where we need to go with this situation is to setup an interoperable solution where the vendor consolidation will not impact current investments. There were third party companies that used to offer these kind of solutions and we need a new series of such technologies to be recreated.

I'm really wondering why we blame DW / BI architecture or approach as a failure, when a large portion of the silos are being built by vendor disruption in the market. I certainly hope the vendors will provide a scalable and interoperable answer in the near future.

Till we get some sensible set of solutions, we might have to live in a heterogenous world of solutins and thrive on chaos.

As we look at the last quarter of this year, a very clear subject is emerging as a contender for the "TOP" BI application in the next year. The subject is Social Applications, we are talking about Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Sharepoint becoming a data source for the next generation of data warehouse

What are social applications? these are applications which will be developed and deployed on your existing data warehouse along with data from document/content management platforms, web forums and any textual source, sitting together with your BI applications.

It will not be a stretch to say that BI Applications will be more focused on Social Analytics. Why, because we will be chartering the space where no man has gone before i.e Textual Data of all forms structured, unstructured, semi-structured  - yes your journey into this space is a new odessey.

But the move to social applications will not be a new one. We have been scratching the surface for a decade nearly and have now succeeded in understanding how to integrate that data into the rest of the data warehouse and leverage the knwoledge embedded in the same.

Why will companies invest in social applications

•  The real customer connect will happen in this space. The new age customer maintains their web diaries about product purchase, services etc, that are shared to their social network via facebook. You need to access that indirect marketing channel
  
• If your client base blogs about your services or product and that creates a negative impact, you want to know that
• You want to see who all your competition is and what the world is saying about you vs. them
• You want to gather intelligence as much as possible on anything that you never had access to before.

These are some key drivers on why Social Applications will dominate BI as we move into the next year.

If you are an insurance company, a media or entertainment company, a video game producer or just about in any business that involves customers and interactions, you will invest into Social Applications as your BI investment

Talk about market disruption and the word Data Warehouse Appliance can replace that phrase when it comes to new technology with respect to Data Warehouses. The market of Appliance based offerings from companies old and new are making news everyday. Amidst all this noise, how do you choose the best technology?

Is it price or performance or scalability or all of these in some ratio? what factors drive your decision and what influences your decisions? To arrive at the right decision there are several factors to consider, apart from price, these a few things to consider

• Compatibility - will the platform fit into your existing enterprise
• Scalability - Can it scale to data volumes without additional hardware needs
• Maintenance - Can it be maintained with relative ease
• Usability - How usable will the solution be out of the box

Apart from these factors, you also need to think about the following

• Can it support Textual Data Integration
• Can it support GIS capabilities
• Can it support Open Source Solutions

If you take a step back and examine these points, you will begin to form your own list of features, factors and solutions and come to choose the right solution.

I'm in the process of developing a data warehouse appliance scorecard. This will be areport that will be published at this network and be available by mid-November. The goal of this report is to provide an independent analyst positioning of the DW Appliance offerings.