The Year in Review, The Trends Ahead
It’s that time of year again. Every December, we look back at the year just past, highlight some of its most intriguing trends, and hazard a few guesses about what the New Year will have in store.
It’s that time of year again. Every December, we look back at the year just past, highlight some of its most intriguing trends, and hazard a few guesses about what the New Year will have in store.
So grab some eggnog, turn down (or altogether mute) your iPod’s holiday playlist, put aside your iPad (unless, of course, you’re using it to read this article), and join us as we take a look at the year that was 2010 — as well as the year that could well be 2011. Hint: it’s full of iPods and iPads.
As the Specialty Data Warehouse World Turns
At last … at long last. After more than a few false starts — starting with Microsoft Corp.’s acquisition of the former DATAllegro in July of 2008 — the data warehousing (DW) space experienced something very like consolidation this year. First, in June, SAP AG picked up Sybase Inc., proprietor of — among other assets — the suddenly resurgent Sybase IQ columnar database. Then, in July, storage giant EMC Corp. picked up veteran analytic database specialist Greenplum Software Inc.
Finally, in September, IBM Corp. nabbed the granddaddy of them all — data warehouse appliance specialist Netezza Inc. — for a cool $1.7 billion.
Specialty data warehouse players started getting gobbled up because big name players started paying attention — or a lot more attention — to Big Data, but in and of itself Big Data wasn’t enough to move hardware. Netezza (and its competitors DATAllegro and Dataupia Inc.) had tried that, with mixed results.
It wasn’t until Big-Data-the-Technology-Prescription got hitched to Advanced-Analytics-the-Killer-Application that the specialty data warehouse express really got going. In 2010, nearly everybody was talking about Big Data, usually in connection with some kind of advanced analytic application.
In a growing number of cases, that application was MapReduce. Aster Data Systems Inc. and the former Greenplum were first out of the gate with support for MapReduce (way back in September of 2008), but 2010 saw a rush of MapReduce-oriented activity, chiefly involving Hadoop, an open source implementation of the MapReduce framework. IBM, Teradata, Netezza, Talend, and Informatica Corp., among others, announced Hadoop integration plans.
