Fast Turtle?
For over a long period of time, the IT industry mastered the art of creating and storing information on computers. What was spectacular was the lack of interest in the building the ability to retrieve this information even quickly. The results were well known. A software engineering stream called data warehousing which purely focused on retrieving the information out of the data and providing intelligence to the business.
Funnily, for all the years we spent all the time and energy building fast commercial computers and structuring data bases to make them more powerful to accept and store the information. More funnily, we then spent a huge time, energy and money building tools to retrieve that information over the same building blocks. This was surely the Fast Turtle of the IT Industry. It took quite a while for the industry to realize that Fast Turtle is an oxymoron and not reality and that it has already happened to DWH.
What about Teradata then?
Although a relative late entry in IT evolution, Teradata did set the rules for BI appliance computing. Teradata brought in step changes in the way DWH computing was done. It did tame the Fast Turtle. But only to create a White Elephant. Way out of reach of commoners, only the fortune 500 aristocrats could afford it.
The “Time” of Business Intelligence
Inspired by the Teradata success story and sensing an opportunity for a “poor man’s Teradata’, lot of organization dreamt of and created appliances. Netezza brought in a few super computer designers from the US department of defence and created this beautiful appliance which you can stick in your golf cart and take it to office. White Cross, a quintessential British company woke up from 20 year slumber, acquired Kognitio, renamed itself as Kognitio and jumped in the market. Datalegro was not far behind, making itself eligible in the acquisition market. The biggies are now also in. IBM with its Balanced Warehouse (thought it still uses indexes and I would hesitate to brand it as a ‘pure play’ appliance), HP NeoView (Have you got silver streaks in your stubble, or hair to be more politically correct, to remember Tandem) and Oracle (don’t know what they are doing). A sigh of relief over the follies and the quick correction.
Wondering what is the fasted thing in the universe? Yes it is Time indeed. Are appliances the “Time” of Business Intelligence? Only time will tell
