Interesting analysis about Oracle and Sun with respect to BI and DW

As I am catching up on my reading after the Olympics, I came across an interesting overview of what the Oracle Sun merger could mean to the Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing space.  Stephen Swoyer at TDWI wrote the following article entitled "Analysis: What Oracle-Sun Means for BI and DW" which you can read at http://tdwi.org/articles/2010/02/24/Oracle-Sun-Analysis.aspx.  The idea of the data warehouse appliance is very powerful as can be seen by what Teradata and Netezza have been doing and now with what Oracle is doing.  I am wondering if Oracle will also come out with a BI appliance.  Kind of makes sense that this could be a next step for them.

Comments

[Bill Dorfmann]

I'm not sure if a BI appliance is the logical next step for Oracle or not. It seems that Exadata is positioned as a silver bullet that addresses both OLTP (for operational data) and data warehousing (for analytics based on data available from operational data). The sheer brute force of the hardware might make both possible in one stack, rather than having a specialized DW appliance existing separately just for analytics.

On the other hand, it seems that Oracle has become a master at market segmentation -- i.e. offering different capabilities for different price points. They've done that on the relational database side, so conceivably they could do it on the data warehousing side as well.