In an upcoming webinar, we’ll get up to date on Cloud Data Warehousing with guest speaker Noel Yuhanna, Forrester principal analyst; Prat Moghe, (Cazena founder & former Netezza SVP) and…You! Noel will present a short and succinct overview of cloud data warehousing, a market he’s tracked as an analyst since its inception. Then, we’ve planned lots of time for your questions and an interactive discussion, moderated by yours truly. I’m looking forward to it, as this panel has watched data warehousing change dramatically in recent years, from different perspectives. Consider where things were just back in 2010…
Back then, Prat was running product strategy for Netezza, which IBM had just acquired for its hugely successful data warehouse appliance. Noel was covering data warehousing for Forrester, presciently writing on topics like the potential of cloud databases and information-as-a-service. I was editorial director of online pubs including SearchDataManagement.com, working with reporters on data warehousing trend articles. (Me: “Big data, such a fad term, it’ll never last.” Hey, trend-spotting is hard.)
In 2010, Microsoft released “Windows Azure”. Amazon Web Services (2006) was gaining traction with developers, but two years away from releasing the Redshift cloud data warehouse (2012). Hadoop components HBase, Hive, Pig had recently “graduated” to top-level Apache projects. Pop radio was playing Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister,” theaters featured the Facebook-inspired movie “The Social Network” and we were on the iPhone 4 (no Siri till 2011!) The landscape has changed radically since then.
Now, thousands of companies use cloud data warehousing, and many more plan to migrate. The data warehouse appliances that were all the rage even six short years ago are reaching capacity, and/or becoming new targets of datacenter consolidation initiatives. Many enterprises now have “cloud-first” strategies, forcing resource-strapped teams to sort out how to best migrate decades of on-premises data warehouse systems and processes to the cloud.
Cloud providers have evolved significantly, which is positive, but also introduces much more complexity. And then of course there’s the undeniable impact of Hadoop/Spark, Big Data as a Service and a spate of new databases to consider. We’ve also learned best, and worst, practices along the way. Suffice to say, a lot has changed.
In the webinar, we’ll share our perspectives on how to successfully incorporate cloud into your data warehousing strategy – and we hope you’ll share yours. Register now, and get your questions ready!
(And sorry for putting Hey, Soul Sister in your head. It’s an ear worm.)
