Over the last couple of decades, companies in virtually every industry have used data warehouses to collect and organize data that they analyze to gain insight about their market, customers and their own operations. The business value they have realized has moved data warehousing and Business Intelligence (BI) from discretionary to business critical for most large organizations.
But for midsize organizations or departmental users within large companies, there have been a number of obstacles to deploying a data warehouse and comprehensive BI environment. Vendors, focused on delivering large enterprise platforms, have offered products and tools that are too expensive, too difficult to manage and use, and that are overkill for the mid-market, requiring skills that they often don’t have. So, the under served mid-market has had to make do with spreadsheets and manual processes, dealing with reporting and BI on an application by application basis, often resulting in inconsistency and lack of data governance.
However, as the business environment is getting increasingly complex, data warehousing and BI capabilities are no longer a necessity for only large enterprises. Mid-market companies also need business analytics to differentiate themselves, detect market trends, reduce costs and risk, and better understand and serve their customers.
In fact, surveys indicate that mid-market companies recognize the importance of analytics and are anxious to develop the capability, along with the underlying data warehouse platform. According to a June 2011 article in ITJungle, 83 percent of mid-market CIOs identified analytics as their top-priority investment area.
This is a significant trend because midsize businesses, together with small enterprises, are responsible for nearly 65 percent of the global GDP, represent more than 90 percent of all businesses and employ over 90 percent of the world's workforce. It’s important to the world economy that they embrace analytics to help them run more efficiently and manage their businesses effectively.
At Dell we believe that data warehousing, BI and analytics should be cost-effective and easy enough for all organizations to use to optimize their business. This is why we are bringing price/performance value to data warehousing, helping all organizations to tap the power in their data. Today we are proud to announce the Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance 1000.
The Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance is a powerful platform which takes advantage of innovations in the new Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers and Microsoft SQL Server 2012 DBMS to optimize capacity and performance in a small footprint. It then goes a step beyond other data warehouse appliances by including a cloud-based data integration service (Dell Boomi) as well as a start-up service that helps get clients off to a successful start, plus a quarterly healthcheck that helps ensure ongoing success. For more information about the Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance, visit dell.com/quickstartdw.