Ventana Research is the first research company to benchmark the maturity and direction of BI and Data Warehousing performance and scalability that is critical for business data for business processes and decision making. Businesses need reliable information about how their BI and data warehouse systems are performing in order to analyze and tune their performance. In addition organizations are examining and deploying alternatives like columnar databases, appliances and integration technologies.

Despite the fact that organizations today depend on the information from business intelligence systems and data warehouses, new research from Ventana Research shows that less than one-fifth of businesses are fully mature in their deployment and use of these key business tools. Moreover, these businesses need reliable information about how their BI and data warehouse systems are performing in order to analyze and tune their performance, but less than half said that their information sources are good or excellent to assess their situation.

The new benchmark research, “Optimizing BI and Data Warehouse Performance,” finds that organizations are coming under increasing pressure to improve the performance of BI and data warehouse systems. They are most interested in BI and data warehouse systems for use in optimizing business processes (81%) and identifying opportunities for improvement (78%). But, the research found that some of the key information demands that must be met to support these business objectives are not being addressed effectively.

The benchmark research found that as organizations try to perform fuller analysis of data about customers, products and other key areas, they encounter challenges – difficulty scaling from complex queries for analytics (58%) or to handle more data (55%) and more real-time needs (54%). The research found that availability requirements are also serious, with almost half of organizations currently making their BI and data warehouse systems available by 7x24.