Intelligent Enterprise

Despite this country's credit crisis, it appears there are still plenty of big-money bets being placed on emerging information technologies. This morning alone I've seen hefty sums put into data warehouse appliances, complex event processing (CEP) and master data management (MDM). Knowing a thing or two about each market, I'd say they are far from subprime investments.

As Charles Babcock reports in this story, data warehouse appliance vendor Greenplum announced yesterday that it has raised $27 million in venture capital financing. Greenplum combines its open source PostgreSQL-based database with Sun Microsystem's Thumper storage system to form the Sun/Greenplum Data Warehouse Appliance. Less than a year ago, Greenplum raised $11 million in venture capital to fuel development. The common thread in the appliance business is shared-nothing architecture and massively parallel processing on commodity hardware for unprecedented price/performance. It's a sure antidote to the era of exploding data volumes.

CEP is the answer to the challenge of spotting patterns in massive volumes of streaming data so you can make decisions in real time. The technology is used up and down Wall Street, where it has been put to the test in recent weeks as traders try to make sense of the buying and (mostly) selling patterns. Today's CEP news is that IBM is buying AptSoft, a privately held company based in Burlington, Mass.

"AptSoft technology will strengthen IBM’s SOA and business process management (BPM) offerings through its simple, intuitive interface and correlation capabilities, which are designed to be easily used by business analysts and information technology (IT) professionals," asserted IBM's press release.

Terms were not disclosed, but my take is that IBM is buying technology and knowhow. If it wanted a big base of CEP customers, it would have purchased a more established player such as Coral8 or StreamBase.

The last bit of investment news this morning was that Siperian has raised $25 million in venture capital. MDM is about data quality, ensuring accurate and consistent data on customers, products and other domains. According to Forrester Research, the MDM market is expected to reach $6.7 billion by 2010 with year-over-year growth averaging between 55 percent and 59 percent. The latest wrinkle in the MDM market is software that ensures data accuracy and consistency across multiple domains.

"I have seen positive momentum towards multi-data-domain operational MDM solutions," stated Rob Karel, Forrester's MDM analyst. "That being said, in 2008, IBM and Siperian will appear to be ‘first to market’ with these multi-domain offerings."

While first to market helps, DW appliances, CEP and MDM are three emerging markets that can now be safely said to have arrived.