There's a lot of buzz in the business intelligence world these days about appliances. At first blush the term sounds confusing. It evokes images of something you would find in your kitchen rather than in the IT server room. In fact, appliances for business intelligence applications have been around in some form for decades.
So what's an appliance?
In the 1980's, the advent of personal computers and networking made it possible for small businesses to enter the computer age in great numbers for the first time. Unfortunately, most small business owners lacked either the time or skill to put together an integrated business solution. And if the business owners could find people with the time and necessary skill, they couldn't afford them. This created opportunities for systems integrators who stepped in with bundled hardware and software solutions, tailored for specific business applications. Such solutions were called "turnkey systems," because it was already installed and configured and all you needed to do was "turn the key" and drive the system.
Fast forward a few years and vendors responding to the need for "turnkey" solutions for data warehousing began building and configuring "data warehouse appliances" along very similar principles. The appliance is a bundle of hardware and software that has been pre-configured and optimized for a specific application, such as data warehousing. (Need background on data warehousing, schemas, etc.? Review Parts One and Two on processing data in the BI data life-cycle and the Data Warehouse Imperative.)
Why would I want an appliance?
You can make a very strong business case for buying an appliance rather than trying to build your business intelligence or data warehouse solution from scratch. Some of the key advantages are listed below:
The hardware and software are pre-selected and installed for you.
The system is configured and sold based on the amount of data you're pulling out of your source system, removing much of the guesswork involved in tweaking the system for performance.
Many appliances come with extras like administration consoles, to make system management easier. This can be a major consideration for small or medium sized businesses.
The appliance vendor becomes the single point of contact for all support. This can be huge. Just ask your IT person how many times he or she has stressed over troubleshooting system issues when the hardware vendor is blaming the software vendor and vice versa. And how much money has that, in turn, cost you?
So what's the catch?
You would think that for providing all this wonderful service, the integrator who puts this all together would charge a stiff premium over the cost of the hardware and software components bought separately. Actually, Gartner Research has found that this is not the case. But all is not paradise. You still have to design and maintain the database side of the data warehouse, or schema. Many vendors have pre-built schemas available, but these are only starting points for you to customize for your business.
Before I bought a data warehouse appliance (or similar - Microsoft has, for example, just released a "decision support" appliance bundle) I would ask some pointed questions of my prospective vendor partner:
Can I talk to other customers that you've worked with before to gain the benefit of their experience with you?
If I'm a growing business, how much flexibility do I have to expand as my needs change? How much is that going to cost me?
Are you (vendor) willing to commit to a long-term business relationship? And how will that work from your end?
And, of course, many others that are typical for any vendor/customer relationship, like service levels, do we get any cool logo schwag, etc.
Who are the major players?
Beside the aforementioned Microsoft, most of the big BI vendors participate in this market, either directly (Teradata) or through proxies (for example Netezza, a former independent now part of IBM).
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