Business Intelligence Network business intelligence resources

Blog: David Loshin

« SAP and Business Objects | Main | Location, Location, Location »

Tera Firma...

I noticed the other day looking in the sunday newspaper circulars that one could purchase a 500Gig hard drive for about $150.00. In other words, you could pay a little more than three hundred bucks and have a terabyte of hard drive space in your desktop machine. Considering that some enterprise data warehouses only grow at a rate of 200-500 gigabytes a year means that (presuming I didn't expect to have a significant user load, I had simple reporting requirements, and have good enough data transfer capabilities) I could assemble a pretty capable data warehouse for limited reporting on a machine that might (overall) cost less than a few thousand dollars.

Would anyone want to do this? Probably not your Fortune 100 folks, but it is indicative of the way that we are poised to enable and deploy business intelligence to the medium and even small business constituency. Consider (in addition) the fact that most commonly used BI tool is Microsoft Excel, and now all of a sudden we have the potential for a "break-out" business in turn-key BI. What do you think?

  Posted by David Loshin on October 20, 2007 8:13 PM |

Comments

David, I agree. The economics have reached the point where the barrier to BI capabilities is almost entirely a knowledge barrier, with limited cost barriers for either hardware or even software.
-JF

Posted by: Jaime @ Fitzgerald Analytics | November 28, 2007 6:13 PM

Perhaps the IT Professional will find this sort of amateur ETL/BI/DW silly, but I suspect the coming wave of youngsters with affinity for widgets, gadgets, technology, social networking, self-sufficiency, and good-enough solutions will be all over this.

Posted by: Scott Davis | December 4, 2007 2:06 PM

Post a comment