Data warehouses expanding as info needs grow

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 29 October 2009 11:56

There’s a growing trend amongst businesses in the Asia Pacific region towards ‘real-time’ information needs as companies continue to grow their data warehouses (DWs) to cope with increasing requirements for data analysis, and to meet compliance requirements and enable fact-based decision making.

According to a recent survey of the APAC data warehousing market by IDC, despite the poor economic climate earlier this year, 61.6 percent of respondents expected their organisations' data warehouses to grow in size over the next 12 months.

IDC’s research manager of Asia/Pacific Information Management and Analytics, Sharon Tan information continues to grow no matter if there is an economic crisis or not, but she said that “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 organisations in financial services and the public sector having the highest DW growth expectations."

IDC says it views DW as the foundational layer of business analysis software, which it says is commonly deployed to support increasing requirements for “data analysis, compliance requirements, and enable fact-based decision making.”

According to Tan, the growing interest and trend toward "real-time" information needs 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, Tan said.

Other key factors revealed by the IDC survey 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.