Teradata Tops Forrester Data Warehousing Report

In evaluating vendors in the enterprise data warehouse market, Forrester Research has found that Teradata, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft lead the pack.

For niche deployments, Netezza, Sybase and SAP have the strongest product lines, according to the latest Forrester Wave report written by analyst James Kobielus.

The findings are based on an evaluation of the vendors against 54 criteria, which are grouped into three categories: the breadth and depth of the vendor's product sets, their strategies for evolving their technologies to meet emerging customer demands, and the vendors' market presence based on their financials, adoption, and partnerships.

Among the leaders, Teradata provided the most scalable, mature and flexible EDW product portfolio, the report said. Furthermore, through its recently released 2550 and 1550 platforms, Teradata offers an "increasingly cost-effective solution portfolio for diverse customer requirements."

Meanwhile, Oracle and IBM have significantly improved their respective EDW appliance-based products' scalability and affordability. Microsoft, through its acquisition of DATAllegro and ongoing development of a massively parallel SQL Server appliance, is heading toward the high-end EDW market, Forrester said. Like Oracle and IBM, Microsoft is using its strong presence in the market for database management systems to enter the data warehouse arena, particularly in the growingmid-market.

Among the niche players, Netezza is building a credible EDW-grade appliance product, but primarily delivers special-purpose DW appliances for mid-market and tactical data mart deployments, the report said. Sybase has become a strong niche player by building its portfolio on top of the company's mature columnar databae, which is optimized for scalable, high-volume queries against large table aggregates.

SAP, on the other hand, has a substantial EDW market presence through its Business Warehouse EDW software platform, which is embedded in SAP's NetWeaver BI product. The latter software is licensed and deployed with many SAP line-of-business packaged applications.

Most SAP NetWeaver BI and Business Warehouse deployments are at corporations that have standardized on SAP software. However, the vendor's EDW and BI technology can be licensed and deployed by non-SAP organizations.

Unique among the vendors evaluated by Forrester, SAP's Business Warehouse can persist structured data to any of several third-party database management systems. This positions SAP to one day break out of its current niche and sell to non-SAP organizations. BothSybase and SAP have a strong emphasis on real-time EDW and BI and target the mid-market.

All the vendors in this evaluation are earnestly pursuing the appliance go-to-market approach. "Of all takeaways, that's the most significant one to come from this research," Forrester said.

In addition, the vendors are looking to meet customers needs for more scalable data warehouses by continually rolling out more sophisticated massively parallel processing, compression, partitioning, indexing, query optimization, and dynamic resource provisioning features. All the above improvements are needed as EDW increasingly becomes the underpinning of mission critical applications, such as BI, performance management, data mining and closed-loop business process optimization, Forrester said.

The full report, entitled "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms, Q1 2009," is available through Forrester's Web site.