|
Assessment of Technology's Prospects for Success in the Marketplace
According to industry analysts, the market for data warehousing products and services in government is exploding, fueled by a growing need by government and citizens to access and analyze data for a variety of purposes. Today data warehousing systems and business intelligence tools enable agencies to extract valuable information from their databases and deliver more useful services to citizens and other users.
The expanding market of data warehousing includes both federal agencies and state and local governments. Federal government spending on data warehouse-related projects is expected to rise from $579 million in 1999 to $911 million in 2004, a cumulative average growth rate of 9 percent, according to the Vienna, Va.-based IT Market Research Firm.
State and local government spending is rising even faster, growing from $550 million in 1999 to about $1.1 billion by 2004, according to Dataquest, a research arm of the Gartner Group in Stamford, Conn.
A recent study from Deloitte Research of New York backs up claims of the growing business potential of data warehousing and the related area of decision support. IT officials were asked to rank the most important technologies, data warehousing moved to No. 2 in 2000-01 from No. 5 in 1998-99, while decision support vaulted from eight to four. Figure 8 shows the current demand for data warehousing
All the big names in the IT arena provide data warehousing solutions, including system integrators such as Andersen Consulting, IBM Corp. and Unisys Corp., major database vendors such as IBM, Informix Corp., Microsoft, Oracle Corp. and Sybase Inc., and other players like France�s Bull and NCR Corp.
Successful results in government sector include:
- Decreasing costs and increasing income by exposing patterns of fraud and waste, such as in taxation, health care and welfare programs;
- Understanding the impact of programs and planning new programs, such as in health care, education and law enforcement;
- Reporting on how agencies use resources, such as personnel and finances.
Businesses will increase their annual spending by nearly 74% in the next three years on data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) solutions, according to newly released research from Survey.com, the leading eResearch services company. The study reveals that businesses of all sizes continue to make sizeable investments in data warehousing and business intelligence projects.
The data warehousing and business intelligence market has experienced soaring growth in past years. The market is starting to show signs of maturity and its once spectacular growth rate has begun to moderate but continues to outperform many other technology markets.
The demand for data warehousing is emanating from several sources. First, years of work to remedy the Y2K problem finally have concluded. Second, many agencies have heaps of transaction data, often on legacy systems, with no easy means to access that data. Third, new government directives on reporting and oversight require accessing this data, if only in summary form. Fourth, government agencies are trying to satisfy their constituents by providing new services and access to information. And finally, using the World Wide Web for e-commerce or other transactions requires improved access to data. Data warehousing addresses all these issues, because it stages otherwise-inaccessible data in a structure that allows for simpler access and analysis.
Return
|
