Forrester regularly provides fodder for bloggers when they report on the EDW space (see Curt Monash’s review of their last report here). They have a 2013 report out now that is quite mysterious (see here).
They report that Pivotal is up there with the leading EDW vendors and positioned to move further up.
Here is the mystery. If you go to the Pivotal site and search on “data warehouse” you get ten hits:
- Eight talk about analytic data warehouses, not enterprise data warehouses;
- One talks about using Hive as a data warehouse; and
- One talks about data and sandboxing.
There are no hits on the term “enterprise data warehouse” and one hit on the term “EDW” which refers to why you should move data off of the EDW to an analytic platform.
As I’ve pointed out… Pivotal does not market into the EDW space. They are not developing product for that space. EDW is not part of their product strategy.
The fact that their product is a capable platform for an EDW is worth noting… and readers of this blog should consider GPDB, aka Greenplum, for EDW projects. But you should be fully aware of the risk that Pivotal is not really backing this use case.
For an analyst to suggest that Pivotal has an industry-leading strategy in a space that they are not pursuing at all is very odd.
Perhaps Forrester was looking at the existing install base? I think most GPDB in production are operating as an EDW. But to see that trend increase is strange… Customers making purchases on product architecture rather than product marketing; that would make for an odd trend these days:)
I guess that is it, Jim? I don’t really disagree that Greenplum could be ranked high on their current offering. It is a good product despite some neglect. But how could they be credited with a strong strategy in this space?
Rob