Publication Date: July 15, 1996

Industry Brainstorm: What's Hot in Data Warehousing?

Boy, it's hot out there. The data warehousing market, now valued at about $3.5 billion, is expected to more than double – to $8 billion – before the end of the century. With this in mind, we asked a panel of experts: "What are the trends to watch in data warehousing?" Their answers varied, but the general consensus is that the Internet and intranets present enormous opportunities in this field. Other issues - such as data mining and metadata strategies - emerged, too. The experts' views appear in summary form below.

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Larry English
President and Principal
Information Impact International, Inc.

"There are three major trends emerging that I see important to data warehousing," says English: "Data mining, data quality and convergence of Internet/intranet technology with data warehouse. Data mining is where you are going to get major value from your warehouse to discover answers to 'unasked questions.' Data quality of your warehoused data will limit or enhance the value and use of the data warehouse. Inaccurate or missing data may cause both a loss of credibility and disuse of the data warehouse, as well as inaccurate pattern or trend discovery by data mining tools. What is happening with the World Wide Web and the marriage of warehouse information with intranet and Internet technology will multiply the data value through multiplied accessibility." But while those issues are in the forefront, "the overriding critical success factors are sound management and design principles," English says. "One potential pitfall is looking at technology as a silver bullet. The technology is an enabling tool – not the solution."

Richard Finkelstein
President
Performance Computing, Inc.

Business is moving toward "doing data warehousing and data mining on intranets and the Internet," Finkelstein says. Intranets will allow managers to use simple Web browsers for queries, enable information analysts to publicize their work more easily, and provide opportunities for collaborative data warehousing among company departments, he says. "Intranets make data warehouses far easier to deploy and maintain and use." As for the public Internet, Finkelstein believes "data mining information will be used in more creative ways to give customers information about products." For example, a financial institution could ask a customer to provide a "profile" on-line, then mine its data to provide that customer with a list of recommended banking or investment services. The opportunities in this area are endless.

Warren Thornthwaite
Managing Director
InfoDynamics

"The biggest area right now is the intersection of data access tools and the Internet," says Thornthwaite, who sees a move toward Web-initiated report and retrieval and the development of related tools. "Current tools provide full ad hoc query and reporting functionality on the desktop. The nature of the Internet right now is such that you can’t have as much interaction on the client side – it's basically report browsing and retrieval. … [So] the next phase will be the creation of tools distributed through the Internet. These would include a client piece – perhaps a Java-based applet - that would provide a true, interactive, GUI-type interface to build a (report) query." One possible consequence of such a development: Existing tool vendors would have to retool their business strategies to compete, Thornthwaite says.

Scott Semple
President
NewTHINK, Inc.

"The big thing is data warehousing and the Internet," Semple says. Why? Because of the tremendous access to information this technology affords. In Semple’s model there are three "generations" of data warehousing: establishing the warehouse and tinkering with data; providing universal access beyond the LAN environment; and pulling information into the warehouse from outside sources. But the move toward the Internet, and ubiquitous access, should not be viewed as a simplistic answer. The underlying question, Semple says, must be: "How are people going to use this information to be better knowledge workers?" The bottom line for business is that "the only competitive advantage is better information," he says.

Sid Adelman
President
Sid Adelman & Associates

"Repository and metadata is an important issue," says Adelman, emphasizing that if a company does not have adequate data about data, "you won’t be able to build anything but a simple, trivial data warehouse." At the heart of the repository issue are several management and personnel decisions: Where do you put that repository? Do you use a full-blown repository or smaller, interconnected repositories? How do you integrate the information? And do you have the staff and expertise allocated to maintain this? "As we get more and more [types of] data into the data warehouse, we have to better understand the genealogy and complete characteristics of the data," Adelman says.

Aaron Zornes
Executive Vice President
Application Delivery Strategies
META Group

The focus has shifted from justifying the cost of data warehousing to delivering data warehouses as a strategic business imperative, Zornes says. "As data warehouses expand dramatically in the number of applications, users and size of database, they are increasingly becoming a strategic business initiative (versus merely an interesting technology for mass adopters or a secret weapon of the technology elite) – with emphasis being put on the business solutions: customer service, database marketing, supply chain logistics, and quality management," Zornes writes in his report on DCI’s Data Warehouse World & Expo, held in June in Santa Clara, Calif. "Further out, the next high-ground in data warehousing will require vendors to add better support for data mining, text/multimedia and advanced data visualization."

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Warren Thornthwaite, Larry English, Richard Finkelstein, Sid Adelman, Scott Semple and Aaron Zornes are featured speakers at DCI's Data Warehouse World.

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