Microsoft reported that its SharePoint Server business generated revenue of $800 million during this fiscal year. This represents growth of more than 35 percent over 2006. Microsoft also reported that to date 17,000 customers have purchased SharePoint with 85 million user licenses. I assume that these latter figures include not only SharePoint Server, but also Windows SharePoint Services, which comes with Microsoft's Windows Server platform.

These figures clearly demonstrate the growing influence of SharePoint in workgroup computing. At the portal conference I chair, some 75 percent of the audience use SharePoint. A far smaller number, however, use it for their enterprise portal, and the challenge for these users is how to integrate SharePoint-based workgroups with their enterprise portal.

Richard Hackathorn and I have just published our report on data warehouse appliances. You can find it at www.beyeresearch.com. In the report we define four main types of data warehouse appliance.

1. Native data warehouse appliance where the hardware and software is tightly integrated into a single data warehouse solution. The software and hardware are not individually licensed and cannot be separated. Examples of vendors providing native data warehouse appliances include DATAllegro, Netezza, and Teradata.

2. Software data warehouse appliance where commercial or open source relational DBMS software is designed and/or optimized for data warehouse processing. The software supports hardware solutions purchased from one or more third-party vendors. Examples of vendors or vendors providing software data warehouse appliances include Greenplum and Sybase (Sybase IQ).

3. Packaged data warehouse appliance where commercial software and hardware is tuned for data warehousing, is packaged and supplied by a single vendor, and is installed and maintained as a single system. Examples of vendors providing packaged data warehouse appliances include HP (NeoView), IBM (Balanced Warehouse), and Sun/Greenplum (Data Warehouse Appliance).

4. Data management appliance that offloads data intensive operations from a host computer. The offloaded workload may involve operational, specialized analytics, or archival processing. Examples of vendors providing data management appliances include ParAccel and Dataupia.