Firms keen on expanding data warehouses: IDC

By Enterprise Innovation Editors | Nov 10, 2009

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Data warehousing, typically the groundwork for common business analysis software, is expected to grow over the next 12 months despite the effects of the global economic crisis, a recent report from research house IDC revealed recently.

"Information continues to grow no matter if there is an economic crisis or not. However, growing data volumes often reside in disparate systems, making it a challenge to access timely and precise information. Data warehouses are now in the terabytes, with organizations in financial services and the public sector having the highest DW growth expectations," says Sharon Tan, Research Manager of IDC’s Asia/Pacific Information Management and Analytics, Domain Research Group.

Survey results also suggested a growing interest and trend toward "real-time" information needs. This trend is expected to accelerate as companies expand, conduct business over multiple time zones, and as market volatility becomes less of an exception but a norm. The survey results are generally consistent with IDC's expectations that decision cycles are getting shorter, driving interest and demand for technologies that support more immediate information needs.

Other key survey highlights include:

• About slightly less than one-fifth of the respondents had DWs larger than 100TB in size, with Singapore and Korea leading the way. Data-intensive industries such as those in the financial services sector had the largest DWs. About one-quarter of the organizations in the financial services sector had DWs that were already larger than 100TB.
• Most (28.9%) respondents with DWs indicated that they had between 6 and 10 source transactional or other systems feeding into their DWs. The results indicated that there tended to be more transactional and external systems feeding into DWs, especially in emerging countries like India and China.
• About 35.7% of the respondents surveyed said that they expected DWs to grow at "10% to less than 25%" over the next 12 months. Organizations in Singapore and China had some of the largest DW growth expectations.