Dennis, the following article doesn't even mention Intel as a major server player. - Mephisto
IBM Servers Dominate as Industry Report
Indicates Major Surge in Data Warehousing
Technology Managers Facing Massive Internal Demand for Business Intelligence That
Improves Customer Service, Sales and Marketing
SOMERS, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 6, 1999-- Large Servers in Demand
as e-business Fuels Data Explosion
A recently published technology industry report has revealed a surge in demand for data warehouses. According to a new
study by META Group, ''1999 Data Warehouse Marketing Trends/Opportunities,'' businesses of all sizes are proceeding
at full speed to fund and deploy data warehouse applications.
Moreover, META Group predicts that, by the end of the year, customer growth rates will lead to 30 percent of data
warehouse sites exceeding one terabyte of data, the equivalent of nearly 700,000 fully-loaded floppy disks. META Group
names servers as the primary beneficiary of this trend, representing 40 percent of revenue in the overall market.
''IBM's excellent showing in the data warehouse server market is a result of its solutions approach and wide selection of
scalable platforms which combine to give customers choice and a more rapid return on investment,'' said Aaron Zornes,
executive vice president and director, Application Delivery Strategies, META Group.
Data warehouses combine server and storage hardware, database software and analysis tools to function as central
collection points for information on a company's customers, products and all the transactions in between. Demand for data
warehouses is being driven by marketers, salespeople, financial analysts and customer service managers across all
industries as they prize the results of analysis, or 'mining,' performed on the data in the warehouse. These results offer
what has come to be known as business intelligence, revealing hidden clues on what products and services to sell, to
whom, how, and when.
''Study participants reported a doubling in the size of data warehouses and an increase of 150 percent in budgets,'' said
Zornes. ''This year's largest growth area will be the high-end market segment.''
IBM's family of servers are named as the dominant choice of customers building data warehouses (1), whether the
warehouse serves an entire corporation, or a single department, in which case it is often called a data 'mart.' META
Group labels these two categories of data warehouse ''Centralized'' and ''Line of Business.''
The study revealed the following market share among leading server vendors:
Centralized Line of Business
IBM 30% 24%
NCR 6% 1%
Sun 15% 21%
HP 14% 13%
Sales Leads Hinge More on Data Files than Air Miles
Underscoring this trend, IBM today announced its 120-member Terabyte Club, a collection of IBM customers with more
than one trillion bytes of data stored in each company's data warehouse. A rarity only two years ago, the terabyte-plus
data warehouse is now increasingly common due to rapidly growing investment in business intelligence technology.
''We expect the number of Terabyte Club members to continue to grow and present an enormous opportunity for IBM as
companies delve even further into e-business, increasing the volume of data they gather from all customer contact points,
including the Internet, point of sale, call centers and other channels,'' said Ben Barnes, general manager, IBM Global
Business Intelligence Solutions. ''Right now, companies are doubling their data every 18 months, a rate that means we
could be seeing data warehouses with petabytes, or a quadrillion bytes, of information in the future.''
The Terabyte Club surpasses the amount of terabyte-plus customers claimed by IBM's closest competitor in the high-end
data warehouse market.(2) It includes businesses running on three of IBM's server platforms -- RS/6000, S/390 and
AS/400 -- and will soon include customers using its Netfinity line of servers. Many of these same customers are also users
of IBM's award-winning DB2 family of data management products.
The Terabyte Club is the latest in a series of efforts by IBM to support the massive movement of customers and industries
into the next phase of information-driven e-business. IBM's business intelligence initiative is designed to help customers
leverage the data from their core business processes. By capturing all the data generated from enterprise resource planning
(ERP), supply chain and e-commerce transactions, IBM is helping customers use that data to improve decision making
throughout their organization.
Additional information about IBM can be found on the IBM home page at ibm.com.
Since 1995, META Group has regularly surveyed attendees of DCI's nationwide Data Warehouse World and Data
Warehouse Summit conferences regarding their current and planned data warehouse and data mart activities. META
Group's 1999 Data Warehouse Marketing Trends/Opportunities contains in-depth quantitative information on more than
4,000 data warehouse projects in IT organizations residing within Global 2000 businesses. For more information on
META Group research, see metagroup.com.
(1) Measured by META Group's 1999 Data Warehouse Marketing Trends/Opportunities Report, p. 99.
(2) In a company press release dated February 17, 1999, NCR reported that it currently had 100 customers with
one terabyte of data or more.
IBM, Netfinity, AS/400, S/390 and RS/6000 are registered
trademarks or trademarks of the IBM corporation in the United
States, other countries, or both. Other company, product and
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