The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms, Q1 2009

In Forrester's 54-criteria evaluation of enterprise data warehousing (EDW) platform vendors, we found that Teradata, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft lead the pack because each offers mature, high-performance, flexible, secure, and robust solutions. Teradata is tops in scalability, with its petabyte-scale massively parallel platform, though Oracle has shown great progress recently in EDW appliance scale-out through an intelligent storage layer. IBM has the broadest range of EDW appliance packaging options, while Microsoft has one of the most impressive midmarket-focused EDW solution portfolios. Netezza, Sybase, and SAP are Strong Performers in the EDW platforms market, with a primary focus on niche markets. Among them, Netezza demonstrates the most rapid evolution into a robust EDW platform, though the vendor's data warehousing (DW) appliance primarily addresses tactical deployment for front-end online analytical processing (OLAP) acceleration. Sybase recently launched a family of cost-effective EDW appliances, with its core columnar database suited primarily for very large data marts. SAP's NetWeaver BI platform offers a solid EDW hub capability for existing SAP users, but it aims to evolve into a more flexible platform for real-time business intelligence (BI).