Where to buy your data warehouse in 2010

As we have all seen there has been significant consolidation with in the BI tool space in the past 18 months or so. Some of the bigger players have been (or soon will be) assimilated into the other vendors’ product portfolios. In the main it has been the database vendors who have been shopping, but the pure-plays too have been busy snapping up some small niche players. But what of the data warehouse database vendors?

I sat in on a presentation from Bloor Research at yesterday’s European Netezza User conference. Part of this presentation was gazing into the future five years or so. So who will be there selling data warehouse platforms? Well no surprises that Oracle, IBM and Microsoft will be still selling DW databases, it was also highly probable that both Netezza and Sybase will be there too with their specialised approaches to DW design. But Teradata was only regarded as possibly still in the DW space. Teradata was perceived as differentiating itself from the appliance competition by only pitching for the top-end of business and thus ultimately loosing market share by servicing an ever narrowing band of customers.

My view; Teradata is being set up for sale by NCR, but who would take it on. Microsoft are making a great play of integrating their Analytic Services with Teradata, but taking on what is effectively another OS is not what they are about. Why would IBM look at it either; DB2 probably has a similar (or slightly larger) installed base in DW as Teradata, so buying market share is an option, but how to integrate the product? – remember IBM have owned RedBrick for ages, and it is still not integrated into the DB2 product line. Would Oracle want yet another database? So that leaves other tin-shifters such as HP (Again, unlikely as HP doesn’t understand BI – even though they own Knightsbridge) or, interestingly, an appliance vendor or one of the current pure-play tool vendors. Either of those options would be very interesting indeed.