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Posted by: Peter Benza | July 12, 2008
What advantages do cloudsets have over traditional datasets stored in a corporate data warehouse?
Posted in Access, Business Culture, Control Management, Data Governance, Functionality, Performance | Tags: cloud-based solutions, Data Governance, datasets
Cloudsets in general, and data warehousing ASPs / SaaS in particular, may tilt the economics of this technology niche sufficient to allow some small and medium-sized enterprises to enjoy some of the business intelligence, data visualization, and predictive modeling capabilities of their larger competitors. But speaking as an aspiring entrepreneur with an unsuccessful track record in the data warehousing ASP space, there are a couple of significant mitigating factors that may need to be overcome before this idea gets broad traction:
The corporate fear of sending core internal data to an external repository is very real, and not entirely rational. Nonetheless, aspiring players in this space make have to exhibit exceptional levels of security that far exceed internal corporate data centers, and thus carry these non-trivial costs. And they may nonetheless be hurt by every security breach in the field – even by sloppy competitors with bad security practices.
Also, the emergence of Microsoft as a credible player in the DW/BI space has disrupted the price of entry for DW/BI for smaller companies. This does not completely eliminate the economic advantages of a cloudset-based DW, but it certainly dilutes it. And forces the sale conversation to be based more on core competency focus, and outsourcing non-core tasks (like DW/BI) – rather than economics alone.
And lastly, at the high-end, some companies view their DW/BI investments as strategic differentiators – and would not be willing to reveal their capabilities to competitors through the use of an external service provider, nor be willing to settle for services that their competitors could also purchase. This the marketplace is squeezed from the low end (by low-cost Microsoft-based in-house solutions) and at the high-end (by companies unwilling to settle for commodity DW/BI capabilities.)
Nonetheless, the concept, one marketed appropriately, may still have big potential, given the huge small/medium enterprise market that curretly is under-served by today’s choices.
By: Jim Stagnitto on July 19, 2008
at 9:06 am