IDC Study: Boom Time for Data Warehouse Vendors
IDC provided one of the better tech reads this weekend to fill the gap between New Year and Monday morning. Analyst Stephen Swoyer was part of the team that reportedly takes up to half the year composing IDC’s Data Warehouse (DW) market study (not sure what he does now until July), which in summary – says the market is booming.
The study, which is aimed at analysing 2007 figures, shows DW software revenues growing by nearly 15 per cent in 2007, comfortably outpacing overall software spending - a positive trend that has been upwardly aligned since 2005.
“IDC breaks the DW space down into two sub-segments: data warehouse generation and data warehouse management tools. The former provide nuts and bolts cleansing, transformation, loading and administrative capabilities; the latter consists of database management software (DBMS) used to manage the data inside a data warehouse,” says Swoyer.
Although there is growth on both sides of the IDC DW coin, there are nuances in the market that are dictating differing growth patterns in each stream. That said, almost all areas are positive – and in this time of financial gloom, all round good news stories are hard to come by aren’t they?
After the predictable IBM, Microsoft and yes, I have to mention them even if their press materials are painfully presented in difficult to digest bullet point form, Oracle… there are some other names that come up on the ‘usual suspects’ list. Some are new to me, some I’ve not heard much out of for a good 18 months (and are companies that I’ve known well in the past such as Informatica) and some are stalwarts that clearly have a defined niche, but perhaps lack the corporate muscle (or inclination even) to try and be one of the “big” three mentioned at the start of this paragraph.
Other names to consider include operations such as Teradata Corp., the BI independent SAS Institute Inc., Pitney Bowes, Accelrys Software Inc., Sybase Inc. (not surprising says Swoyer, given the company's ETL and data management stack), Information Builders and Evolutionary Technology International (ETI) with its data integration offering – described by Swoyer in a worryingly partisan style as “unique”.
But after getting to the “who’s who” section and being able to gauge how my own personal market awareness matched up to current developments, I did lose interest to be honest. Why are these trends evidenced in today’s data market, what are the underlying corporate and user-centric themes that have fuelled demand for data warehousing and what products and services have the successful vendors out there brought to market? This was what I wanted to read.
Perhaps that answers the question I often pose i.e. “What’s the difference between a journalist and an analyst?” I was looking for some flavour and seasoning and not just the bare stats. Swoyer could have been simplistic about it and said proliferation of rich web sites and web services plus social networking. That would have been fine. Just some extra substance would be nice please.