This article was originally published in Forbes.
As the cloud wars are heating up, industry-cloud is becoming a focal point. Capturing entire enterprise workloads is the biggest challenge ahead for cloud vendors. It might very well decide the fate of the Hyperscalers’ cloud business. Surprisingly, data warehouse migrations are critical to an industry-cloud strategy.
Wait, what? How could a relatively small market segment of yesteryear be thrown in the limelight and become the lynchpin in high-stakes cloud poker? Startups have long derided data warehouses as the dinosaur in the database business. However, the fact they not only survived all previous attacks but emerged even stronger is a giveaway.
In short, data warehousing, a 30-year-old discipline, is hot like never before. An increasing variety of offerings, not to mention Snowflake’s blockbuster IPO, speak to an accelerating market trend. While customers have their own view on which data warehouse they prefer, cloud providers have set their sights on the incumbents for strategic reasons. Here’s why they play a pivotal role in the cloud wars.
Data warehouses “own” the world’s most valuable data
A large-scale data warehouse is the crown jewel of any enterprise. Typical data warehouses run up to hundreds of terabytes. Petabyte-sized data warehouses are still relatively rare even in large enterprises. But size aside, these systems contain highly refined and curated economic data. Combined, the data warehouses of the Global 2000 may very well represent the most valuable portion of the world’s economic data. Let that sink in.
Much, if not most, of that data sits in data warehouse appliances today. By virtue of having been the first systems that could handle these massive amounts of data, these providers effectively built a monopoly. The high cost of these systems created a virtuous cycle. Customers try to wring every bit of value from their purchase, which in turn requires more and more data to be stored in these systems. And so, it goes. Continue Reading on Site
About Mike Waas, CEO Datometry
Mike Waas founded Datometry with the vision of redefining enterprise data management. In the past, Mike held key engineering positions at Microsoft, Amazon, Greenplum, EMC, and Pivotal. He earned an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Passau, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Mike has co-authored over 35 peer-reviewed publications and has 20+ patents on data management to his name.
