I just listened to this webinar from Greenplum. It basically describes their EDC platform (Enterprise Data Cloud) and how it enables self service bi running on commodity hardware. One central theme is getting data into the hands of business users as fast as possible by giving them their own space and resources to prototype data. I’m heartened to hear thought leaders in data warehousing like Mark Dunlap of Evergreen Technologies promoting the idea of fork lifting data from source systems and deploying atypical approaches to developing BI.
The traditional slow development process is starting to crumble as a hybrid form gains prevalence. I hope IT departments are paying attention to this market trend as I believe they will likely be the biggest political bottleneck in changing the way BI is done an organization.