Data warehouse appliances can be a tough sell because conservative buyers are nevous of making major purchases from saller comapnies, but the EMC brand will remove that concern. Also, EMC have a vast existing customer base and the sales channel that can exploit this. Seems like a sensible move to me.

If nothing else, this demonstrates that you need to have a clearly differentiated position in such a crowded market, and clearly in this case the sales and marketing execution could not match the promise of the technology. However it would be a mistake to thing that all is doom and gloom for appliance vendors, as the continuing recent commercial success of Vertica demonstrates.

To me, something that vendors should focus on is how to simplify migration off an existing relational platform. If you have an under-performing or costly data warehouse, then an appliance (which implies “plug and play”) sound appealing. However although appliance vendors support standard SQL, it is another thing to try and migrate a real-life database application, which may have masses of proprietary application logic locked up in stored procedures, triggers and the like. This would seem to me the thing that is likely to hold back buyers, but many vendors seem to focus entirely on their price/performance characteristics in their messaging. It actually does not matter if a new appliance has 10 times better price performance (let’s say, saving you half a million dollars a year) if it takes several times that to actually migrate the application. Of course there are always green-field applications, but if someone could devise a way of dramatically easing migration effort from an existing relational platform then it seems to me that they would have cracked the code on how to sell to end-users in large numbers. Ironically, this was just the kind of claim that Dataupia made, which suggests that there was a gap between its claims and its ability to convince the market that it was really that easy, despite accumulating a number of named customer testimonials on its web-site.

Even having the founder of Netezza (Foster Hinshaw) did not translate into commercial viability, despite the company attracting plenty of venture capital money. The company has no shortage of marketing collateral; indeed a number of industry experts who have authored glowing white-papers on the Dataupia website may be feeling a little sheepish right now. Sales execution appears to have been a tougher nut to crack. I never saw the technology in action, but history tells us that plenty of good technology can fail in the market (proud owners of Betamax video recorders can testify to that).

If anyone knows more about the inside story here then feel free to contact me privately or post a comment.

These figures, which are admittedly retrospective, confirm our November market research study looking at the effect of the financial crisis on MDM spending. This found that about as many companies were planning to accelerate their MDM spend as were planning to slow it down or defer projects (admittedly nearly a third of respondents were undecided).

So far at least, then, both actually Q4 spend as seen by vendors, and spending intentions in our survey are telling the same story. MDM software revenues are holding up well. We will continue to track the market closely, with a Q2 2009 Market Update to be published in July.

It is certainly hard to be sure just how deep recession is likely to be, with seemingly contradictory data all around. A scary figure is the cost of shipping (the Baltic Dry Index) which is a reasonable predictor of the flow of trade. This has dropped a little matter of 95% since the peak in June, with shipping companies cancelling orders and talking of mothballing ships. This kind of broader economic data would seem to suggest a fairly sharp recession is on the cards, and this must feed through into lower IT expenditure eventually, just as night follows day. Of course some areas will be hit harder than others, but I am always suspicious of claims that a certain area is “strategic” and so will be unaffected. Usually this is whistling in the dark by vendors. We shall see.

A troubling sign of this is in a sector a long way from the world of credit default swaps, that of trucks. Volvo is one of the largest suppliers of commercial lorries and trucks to continental Europe, and sold 41,970 trucks in the third quarter of 2007, when admittedly things were booming. They just announced their Q3 2008 results. How many trucks do you reckon that they sold? Less than 41,970 for sure, but what what sort of reduction might you expect? Maybe a 10% drop in sales, perhaps 20%, or even 30% if things had become really bad? Well, they actually sold 115 trucks in the last three months. That is not a typo. It is a 99.7% reduction in sales.

Now that is a scary number.

The Information Difference will shortly be conducting a survey of enterprise software buyers, looking specifically at their spending plans for master data management and data quality. I’ll keep you updated when we have some results (a few week’s time). If your company would like to sponsor this survey, you have four days left to do so (just contact me and I’ll send you details).

There doesn’t seem to be a place where this kind of information is gathered together but there is now.

http://www.informationdifference.com/vendor_technical_details.html

This also has information on the level of SOA support (if any), which non-English languages are supported in the user interface etc.

Generally this has little impact, but a lack of exit opportunities is a poor thing for the enterprise software sector in general, as venture capital firms are less likely to invest in earlier stage firms with one of the two exit routes (the other being a trade sale) closed. Initiate had made excellent market progress with its MDM technology, and it would have been nice to see a pure-play MDM vendor going public.

13% of the (mostly larger) 112 companies surveyed had over 100 systems that hold and maintain customer data, which gives some idea of the scale of the problem that MDM is tackling. It is bit more than “just put in a hub” when you have systems at this level of complexity.

Given the generally flaky level of data quality reported, I found it surprising that nearly a third of the companies in the survey had not purchased an automated data quality tool.

The good thing was that plenty of companies seem to have begin measuring the costs of poor master data, and those costs are high, which should make it easier to justify master data management initiatives.

Its principals are Dave Waddington (ex Chief Architect at Unilever Foods) and myself, with some part-time assistance from a number of other talented individuals. It is nice to see some positive reactions from some serious industry luminaries (see press release).

We hope to bring a more in-depth perspective to this emerging market than is common today, and have some exciting research in preparation.

For more information see the company website.

Given the scale of the SOA bandwagon, I am a little surprised that semantic integration does not get even more attention. Perhaps it is the partly the name: “semantic” and “ontology” are hardly the terms that a marketer would come up with in trying to sell this technology to a mass audience. Moreover the problem is quite a deep one, and it is going to be a clever technology indeed that can browse through a company’s applications and derive a meaningful business model that captures all the implied meaning that is currently embedded within data models, database stored procedures and application code in all its guises.

Still, at least now there are a number of technologies starting to address the problem, and the market will decide which ones work and which ones are just marketing fluff. As SOA rumbles on, I expect to see more activity in this space, and more M&A activity as the larger vendors wake up to the importance of this area. However, it would be really nice if someone managed to come up with some decent names for this market. I had thought that “ontology” was a term that I could safely bury away in the recesses of my mind after I completed my philosophy subsidiary course at University. I can’t see it making to mass media, can you? “Link: The new semantic integration software with its own ontology endorsed by David Beckham” isn’t likely to be wending its way to a TV advert any time soon.