MASTERING DATA
A host of developments promise to improve customers' ability to make smarter business decisions.
By Jasper Moiseiwitsch

Caognos's successful bid for rival Adaytum in December 2002 is just one indication that the business intelligence (BI) software market is heating up. BI has been one of the few software growth areas since the 2001 economic downturn, according to AMR Research in the US. Its Enabling Technologies Report 2001-2006 stated that the global market for BI grew ten percent to US$5.6 billion in 2001, and is expected to exceed US$12 billion by 2006, a compound annual growth rate of 17 percent.

"In 2002, business intelligence found its way out of the basement," the AMR report stated. "...[US Federal Reserve chairman] Alan Greenspan credited an increased access to data with providing a milder recession and a faster comeback."

While the companies that make core BI software fight for market share, developments in related areas promise to improve customers' ability to crunch through vast stores of data and make smarter business decisions. One reason BI and data warehousing can be so costly is that companies continually add to the stores of information they need to process, thus driving up total storage costs even as cost-per-unit declines. One answer may be application data management (ADM), a method for enforcing data growth and retention policies by moving unused data off production databases while still providing access to it through whatever applications require it. This software differs from traditional archiving methods because it is application-specific, and works across distributed environments. Gartner analysts predict a 64 percent compound annual growth rate for ADM software through 2006.

While ADM allows companies to make the most of the hardware they've got, a case can also be made for new gear. Consider Netezza, a US-based BI vendor, which recently rolled out its first tera-scale data "appliance," a combination of hardware, software, and storage designed specifically to tackle BI. Combining servers, storage, and database into a single unit, the Netezza Performance Server line is billed as providing 10 to 20 times the speed of conventional processing at half the cost. The server sits underneath BI software to provide a horsepower boost.

Steve Duplessie, founder of US consulting firm Enterprise Storage Group, says the product is a breakthrough, with the potential to radically change how companies approach analytics, avoiding the overloading of infrastructure with what is often a demanding form of processing. They can also spend less time preparing data and more time analyzing it.

Netezza's ready-to-use data warehouse may appeal to companies that have resisted the large investments that traditional data warehouses require. Kalido, a relatively new entrant in the data warehouse space, will soon offer new options. The company's Dynamic Information Warehouse (DIW) product is to be offered in a more modular format, with customers having the option of buying only the interfaces they need (to specific ERP systems, for example).

More notable is a new Kalido product dubbed "reference data management." Reference data is the term for information that changes, as opposed to transactional information, which doesn't. The two most common forms are customer and product data. Both can bedevil analytics because they may be referred to differently in different parts of a company, and often reside across several systems. The Kalido engine can peer into all those systems and produce a "golden copy" that is always the most up-to-date and reliable.

Scott Leibs is editor of CFO IT, CFO Asia's sister publication in the US. Additional reporting by Karen Winton.