Welcome to my blog! In this "Soundbytes from Brian" blog, you'll get to hear my thoughts and reports on hot topics to enzees, happenings in the data warehousing and BI industries, and other fun stuff that I think enzees around the globe care about. Hopefully you'll find this blog both entertaining and informative - and please comment so we can get some good discussions going!

My first posting has to do with - what else - the economy. Stop yawning - hopefully this enzee-oriented twist contains information that you care about! As we all know, the worldwide economy is shaping up to be a bear market for the bulk of 2009. So I’d feel overly optimistic saying that the BI/data warehousing industry will be a raging bull market this year.

But then again, when you listen to the experts, it’s hard not to think that we enzees may very well be sitting in the middle of 2009’s silver lining!

Here are a few words of wisdom that may convince you to jump on the BI/data warehousing bull market bandwagon:

• Stephen Swoyer from Enterprise Systems says: With market watchers Gartner Inc., IDC, and Forrester revisiting and revising their IT spending forecasts downward for 2009 and beyond, spending on business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) appear, paradoxically, to be holding steady or poised for growth.
• Dan Vesset and Brian McKnight from IDC report to Enterprise Systems:"[Our] analysis suggests that we are at the beginning of a new wave of business analytics deployments that will materialize over the next decade and will be focused on addressing two primary demands [i.e., an ability to handle both more data and more users]."
• Brian McDonough from IDC says: "As information access, analysis, and management software markets continue to adapt to changes in demand, IDC believes that these technologies will be increasingly deployed in the context of specific business processes. Making information actionable, rather than just accessible, is paramount to successfully competing in these markets in 2009.
• Jeff Gleason from Aegon USA Investment Management explained to InfoWorld: “… it's always tough times like now when we wish our enterprise architecture practice were more mature, that we didn't have so much redundancy, that system changes were easier and faster…”<!--[endif]-->
• David Stodder from Ventana Research explained to Intelligent Enterprise: “In the recent Ventana Research ‘Optimizing BI and Data Warehouse Performance’ research study, more than half (58%) of participants said they are experiencing sometimes nightmarish performance problems when they have to scale to run more complex queries, and nearly half (48%) said they have the same problem when scaling to load more data. As a result, they are canceling important queries when they simply run too long. Thus, it's not surprising that the study found that organizations are evaluating appliances and column-oriented databases to remedy problems in these areas."
• Eric Lai from ComputerWorld says that, according to a recent Forrester study: “The survey also found BI becoming ubiquitous, with almost 60% of respondents saying they were deploying BI, data warehousing or data integration tools across their enterprises."
• IDC Research reported in their 2009 predictions webinars: Companies across all industries – including the financial services! – will look to cut costs overall, but they’ll continue to invest in innovative BI solutions in 2009.

So, to all you enzees out there, breathe easy! I’m not going to lie – every industry will be tough in 2009 – but best-of-breed solutions in data warehousing and business intelligence, and the people that implement and run them, should be OK. Knock on wood.

- Brian