There's lots of buzz these days on appliances in the Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse space. Twenty-eight years ago, Teradata established the first reference pattern of a database machine, later to become known as a data warehouse appliance when "data warehouse" caught on. Netezza made the term "appliance" popular in 2000 with it's marketing campaign. Now several database vendors (Greenplum, Asterdata, Vertica, Paraccel, Dataupia to name a few) offer their product as an appliance either with their own DBMS software or combined with a pre-defined hardware configuration from a hardware partner. According to Gartner, roughly 50% of of the vendors on the 2010 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant are considered appliances.
So today's concept of an "appliance" in the data warehouse & business intelligence space appears to be centric to the database management function. That's a great start, but how do I get the data into these database appliances and how do I get it out for consumption and to take action? What about the data integration, data visualization, data analytics and operational performance management functions? Will we see appliances pop up in the data integration, visualization, analytics and performance management functional areas as stand alone appliances or will we see the database management appliances expand their scope to include these other mission critical functions? Will we find ourselves inter-connecting functional-silo appliances or will we see an evolution towards bundled "BI in a Rack" multi-functional appliances? Will the multi-function appliances contain all of the compute, storage and network services necessary to seamlessly enable the inter-operability across the data integration, data management, visualization, analytics and performance management functions? Can I fill up cages with "BI in a Rack" functional appliances to facilitate “sprawl” (multi-node grid processing across these functions)?
Presuming for a moment that the short answer to my barrage of speculative questions is a resounding yes, yes, yes, let's ponder the next question. Can I simply subscribe to these functional "BI in a Rack" appliances as a set of services? Dare I say it...can I get Business Intelligence as a Service?
I'd like to hear your thoughts.
