Data Warehouse Appliance Case Study; Evolution or Revolution?

Hello all readers, in Sauter's 3843 class and beyond. First off let me give you the site I found for which this blog will be written about: http://www.beyeresearch.com/executive/4639

The article is results of a study of data warehouse appliances within certain companies and the financial business benefits from using such a application. The writters of the study defined the purpose of a data warehouse appliance as “The enablement of high-performance data warehousing with a total cost of ownership (TCO) that provides a rapid return on investment (ROI) to the business.” But such application are not that new, having first come into exitence back in the late 1980's. But especially in today's business world, find the quickest return on investment is key, hence the use of a data warehouse application. However, the companies sequestered in the study reported that even though the application did help over all, the most money spent was on the aquisition and integration of the source data into the appplication.
The study writters went on to break down four different types of appliances that they had found:

Native data warehouse appliance where the hardware and software is tightly integrated into a single data warehouse solution. The software and hardware are not individually licensed and cannot be separated. Examples of vendors providing native data warehouse appliances include DATAllegro, Netezza, and Teradata.
Software data warehouse appliance where commercial or open source relational DBMS software is designed and/or optimized for data warehouse processing. The software supports hardware solutions purchased from one or more third-party vendors. Examples of vendors or vendors providing software data warehouse appliances include Greenplum and Sybase (Sybase IQ).
Packaged data warehouse appliance where commercial software and hardware is tuned for data warehousing, is packaged and supplied by a single vendor, and is installed and maintained as a single system. Examples of vendors providing packaged data warehouse appliances include HP (NeoView), IBM (Balanced Warehouse), and Sun/Greenplum (Data Warehouse Appliance).
Data management appliance that offloads data intensive operations from a host computer. The offloaded workload may involve operational, specialized analytics, or archival processing. Examples of vendors providing data management appliances include ParAccel and Dataupia.

With the similarity of each type, the study showed that in the business market, choosing the right type of appliance for a particular warehousing project became exhedingly difficult. However the big differenct was the capability to warehousing projects with varied workloads of simple or complex queries as well as concurrent data warehouse updates. Some distinguishing charateristics involved performance and scalibility,hardware and software reliability, flexibility for expansion, support for preferred third-party hardware and software suppliers, workload management features, and data management and utility capabilities.

I believe that as more companies really on DBMS, the need for such application will increase and become common place amoung all companies, domestic and international. And with this applications, the need for the personal and support will need to come with them thus leading to a greater need of deeper education and knowledge of such systems and applications. Put more simply, MIS/IS degrees reciepents won't have a very hard time finding jobs.

Thanks for reading.