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.
