The data warehousing market has moved beyond the ‘early adopter’ phase and will continue to enjoy strong growth for the next five years, according to recent research from market analyst Dataquest. The sector was worth $1.47bn last year, a 34% hike on 1996 figures, and is forecast to reach $1.88bn in 1998, a 28% gain. More than 80% of the demand in this sector, says Dataquest, was for ‘business intelligence’ software tools from vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects that enable users to access, analyze and report data. The fastest growing segment of the market was the ‘data mart’ sector. Revenue generated by data marts defined as subsets of data warehouses that are deployed on a departmental level and in smaller organizations grew 205% in 1997, to reach $61.6mn. Dataquest expects competition in the data warehousing sector to become increasingly intense this year as relational database management system vendors, including Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft, seek to increase their market share.
