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IBM 'Smart Analytics System' Aimed at Reinventing Data Warehousing: Page 2 of 3

IBM executives made numerous claims about faster, optimized performance and lower cost, most of them tied to IBM's unique ability to bring together all the piece parts -- from hardware to systems management to applications. "We believe the cost of the total system is reduced by at least 50 percent [compared to the build-in-yourself approach]," Krishna said. "If you buy the storage, operating system, hardware, and warehousing and analytic software a la carte and then you integrate everything yourself, can you imagine the nightmare of version gridlock or the puzzle of optimizing it to work together more efficiently? IBM has taken care of all of that and we support it all under one contract."

The Competition

Plenty of data warehousing vendors have combined storage, servers, networking and database management systems that can be purchased and supported as a single product. But IBM is upping the ante particularly by bringing BI software and industry-specific content into the same package. Executives also made it clear that technologies from pending acquisitions, such as SPSS, and past acquisitions, such as ILog, would be deliverable through the new system. If the combinations prove to be broadly applicable and appealing, it would challenge the status quo in data warehousing. Oracle could likely muster a response by combining its Sun hardware, BI software and applications, but most other vendors, from Teradata and Microsoft to Sybase, Netezza and Greenplum would have to forge new partnerships.

The competition that IBM didn't mention yesterday was commodity hardware and open-source software, which have already been powerful agents of change in data warehousing.

"When companies see the performance they can get out of cheap hardware and open-source databases, they are putting these systems into production," says Jim Davis, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at SAS, a rival of both IBM Cognos and SPSS. "The computing power that we're seeing out of those types of environments is going to challenge the Oracles, the IBMs and, to some extent, the Microsofts of the world."