It is interesting to see Kognitio launching a data warehouse on demand service. Traditionally data warehouses are built in-house, partly because they are mostly “built” rather than bought even today, and partly because of the data-intensive nature of them, by definition involving links to multiple in-house systems. However there is no real reason why the service cannot be provided remotely. In my days at Shell my team used to provide a similar internal service to small business units who did not want to build up in-house capability. We implemented a warehouse, built the interfaces and then managed the operational service. Kognitio is well placed to provide such a service because they have good data migration experience, and they conveniently have a powerful warehouse appliance, which is much more mature than many others, even if it has been, until recently, not very successfully marketed. Hence this seems an astute move to me.
I would not expect this to be the last such offering. Given some clear advantages that software as a service brings to customers (less installed software footprint, typically a smoother pricing model) it will be interesting to see whether these advantages outweigh the fear in customer minds about allowing their key data outside the firewall.
For “fear” read “Sarbanes-Oxley”; I predict that some potential clients (or their CIOs) will use SOX and similar regulations as an excuse to retain existing IT empires and avoid being cut out of the loop between business and the service provider…