Evolution of Data Warehouses for the Next Three Years

According to TDWI survey ran in May 2010, 75% respondents are planning to replace their data warehouse platforms. They are looking for Operational Data Warehouse, integrating two main technology stacks:

1. Operational applications, usually including:
   • enterprise resource planning (ERP)
   • customer relationship management (CRM)
   • sales force automation (SFA)
   • and others
2. Business intelligence/data warehousing (BI/DW)

Today, the data movement from the application stack to BI/DW is one-way, mostly overnight. With growing need in data integration, companies are looking for bi-directional data links between these two massive stacks, as well as faster and more frequently, with the BI functions used by Web services and other applications. The Operational DW is called to enlighten more business operations with full informational view, historical context, and analytic power of the data warehouse, and integrate the businesses and the business processes that are automated by the integrated software.