2011 will be the year when data warehousing reaches what could well be its most significant inflection point since its inception, according to Gartner Inc. The biggest and possibly most-elaborate data management system in the IT house is changing. The new data warehouse will introduce new scope for flexibility in adding new information types and change detection.

“In 2011, we are seeing data warehouse platforms evolve from an information store supporting traditional business intelligence (BI) platforms to a broader analytics infrastructure supporting operational analytics, corporate performance management and other new applications and uses, such as operational BI and performance management,” says Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Organizations are adding workloads with online transaction processing (OLTP) access, and data loading has moved to intra-day – approaching continuous – loading in many cases.”

In 2010, cost control and performance optimization became critical evaluation criteria and, consequently, the market has begun to accept a higher first cost in exchange for lower administrative and management costs over the life of the data warehouse.

“We are seeing revenue increases for software licensing in the data warehouse DBMS market as vendors have expanded their offerings and marketed their products as ‘easier to implement and manage’,” Feinberg says. “While cost is driving alternative architectures, performance optimization is driving multi-tiered data architectures, including a strong interest in in-memory data mart deployments. At the high end, data warehousing is now mission-critical.”

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