If you have not seen in the last year the large amount of IT focus on reducing the size of the budget and examine alternatives is just about everywhere these days. I have seen the extreme pressure on budgets and planning for 2009 and there are many areas of opportunity for organizations to evaluate reducing costs in data warehousing. These costs have been long part of the industry and budget discussion and in recent years many new options from appliances to specialize columnar database technology as potential options have come to market for data warehousing. The necessity of calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) from a one to five year time frame from implementation to maintenance is critical to understand to reveal where you might find areas to reduce costs.

 I have long been a believer in examining methods to reducing costs in the IT portfolio as long as there is no sacrifice to the business capabilities and service levels. I have been watching as the cost of storage and server technology has reduced significantly over the last five years while the cost of software to manage data has not. Maybe with some database software the software costs have gone down while maintenance costs have increased. This is now changing with a new open source option for data warehousing from Infobright.

This open source data warehousing option from Infobright has recently taken a new step with their online community and availability of their technology Infobright Community Edition (ICE). This database technology that is designed for data warehousing can dramatically reduce the costs and time for those who have data warehouses up to the 25 terabyte range. Also as you examine analytics or business intelligence projects and need a fast method of establishing your data foundation can download Infobright and get up and running very quickly with their data loaders.

Simplifying the data warehouse foundation for your needs is only one component of the overall project and ensuring the integration with BI and the capabilities needed for your business users. Infobright has started on that journey by testing integration across the BI technologies like Pentaho and Cognos. Bringing the technologies together is not too much effort but focusing on the metadata integration and computation needs of BI is where time should be spent to ensure the right level of performance and scalability.

Infobright which operates on low cost commodity hardware and operating systems like Linux can be a simple alternative to using databases from Microsoft or Oracle, or where Infobright started as the data warehouse storage for mySQL. Infobright largest challenge is to make sure that consultants and IT are aware of their option as they look for options to reduce the costs of their existing or planned data warehouse deployments. I would encourage you to examine the full breadth of the data warehouse technology market and all the options from a cost, capability and benefit dimension to see if this open source option will meet your needs. Now, downloading the Infobright software is free, and if you decide to buy service and support will not break your budget, and then look at the labor to load and go and configure your overall project. Infobright is the newest player to the data warehouse market and are a simple and economic option for you to evaluate as you look for methods to avoid and reduce costs in your data warehouse environment.

Let me know your thoughts or come and collaborate with me on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Regards,

Mark Smith
CEO & EVP Research