Our clients will have seen our preview of 2011 last week. For those that aren’t (yet!) clients and therefore can’t see the whole 3,500-word report, here’s the introduction, followed by the titles of the sections to give you an idea of what we think will shape the information management market in 2011 and beyond. Of course the IT industry, like most others doesn’t rigorously follow the wiles of the Gregorian calendar, so some of these things will happen next year while others may not occur till 2012 and beyond. But happen they will, we believe.

We think information governance will play a more prominent role in 2011 and in the years beyond that. Specifically, we think master data management and data governance applications will appear in 2011 to replace the gaggle of spreadsheets, dashboards and scorecards commonly used today. Beyond that, we think information governance will evolve in the coming years, kick-started by end users who are asking for a more coherent way to manage their data, driven in part by their experience with the reactive and often chaotic nature of e-discovery.

In e-discovery itself, we expect to see a twin-track adoption trend. While cloud-based products have proven popular, at the same time, more enterprises buy e-discovery appliances.

‘Big data’ has become a bit of a catchall term to describe the masses of information being generated, but in 2011 we expect to see a shift to what we term a ‘total data’ approach to data management, as well as the analytics applications and tools that enable users to generate the business intelligence from their big data sets. Deeper down, the tools used in this process will include new BI tools to exploit Hadoop, as well as a push in predictive analytics beyond the statisticians and into finance, marketing and sales departments.

SharePoint 2010 may have come out in the year for which it is named, but its use will become truly widespread in 2011 as the first service pack is release and the ISV community around it completes their updates from SharePoint 2007. However, we don’t think cloud-based SharePoint will grow quite as fast as some people may expect. Finally, in the Web content management (WCM) market – so affected by SharePoint, as well as the open source movement – we expect a stratification between the everyday WCM-type scenario and Web experience management (WEM) for those organization that need to tie WCM, Web analytics, online marketing and commerce features together.

• Governance family reunion: Information governance, meet governance, risk and compliance; meet data governance….
• Master data management, data quality, data integration: the road to data governance
• E-discovery post price war: affordable enough, or still too strategic to risk?
• Data management – big, bigger, biggest
• Putting the BI into big data in Hadoop
• The business of predictive analytics
• SharePoint 2010 gets real in 2011
• WCM, WEM and stratification

And with that we’d like to wish all readers of Too Much Information a happy holiday season and a healthy and successful 2011.

No sooner had IBM announced its intention to acquire Netezza this morning than the New York Times came knocking for some perspective on the deal. There were two main questions: will anyone else bid for Netezza, and will someone now bid for Teradata.

While there is no guarantee of a 3Par-style bidding war I believe Netezza has the potential. Just last week we stated that Netezza would be the prime candidate for any firm looking to make an impact in the data-warehousing sector. In a crowded market it offers the right mix of established presence, technological differentiation and growth potential.

According to the 451 Group’s recent Information Management report, Data Warehousing: 2009-2013, Netezza is the fifth-placed data warehousing vendor, albeit some distance behind the established players. The company is predicted to deliver full-year revenue of just under $250m in 2010, in the region of 10% of the data-warehousing revenue of Oracle and IBM, but easily double the revenue of the sixth-placed vendor.

We also think rivals may see some potential to beat IBM’s offer price. As my 451 colleague Brenon Daly notes, the $27 per share purchase price represents an 80% premium against where Netezza was trading a month ago, but just 10% on the previous day’s close. Additionally, IBM is paying 6.8x projected sales which, while a relatively rich valuation, is much lower than rival EMC paid for Greenplum.

One of the reasons we think Netezza could spark a bidding war is that it is differentiated by its growth potential and established market share. It may not be in 3Par territory in terms of the scarcity of comparable rivals (we are tracking 20+ data warehousing providers), but if the likes of HP and Dell are looking to make a significant impact in data warehousing, Netezza is the prime candidate.

The other option would be to make a bid for Teradata, which delivers in market share what it lacks in growth. The company is the the largest data warehousing specialist by a considerable margin and has repositioned its product set to improve growth, so it is no surprise to see speculation that it could be the next acquisition target.

Given Teradata’s $6.2bn market cap, potential acquirers may consider there is more value in trying to outbid IBM. Either way, IBM’s bid for Netezza may not be the last bid to acquire a data warehousing player we will see this year.

One other thing – Netezza is being advised on this deal by Qatalyst Partners. No prizes for guessing who advised 3Par. Qatalyst’s other notable advisory role? The six-week bidding war that resulted in EMC acquiring Data Domain.

In addition to the 451 Group’s own data warehousing webinar on Thursday I will also be taking part in a webinar on Wednesday with EnterpriseDB on the subject of open source database adoption in the enterprise.

During the webinar we will provide recommendations for how organizations can effectively leverage open source software. Attendees will learn about open source software trends for 2010, top considerations when using open source databases, and best practices for successful deployments of open source software.

I’ll be providing some data points from our recent surveys on database adoption and open source adoption while EnterpriseDB’s Larry Alston will also showcase successful enterprise deployments of Postgres Plus.

The open source database webinar is Wednesday, December 16, at 1 pm ET. To register, visit this link.

The data warehousing webinar is Thursday, December 17th, at 1 pm ET. To register, visit this link.

Following the recent publication of our special report, Warehouse Optimization – Ten considerations for choosing/building a data warehouse, I will be presenting an overview of some of the key findings in a webinar on December 17.

The report provides an overview of the data-warehousing vendor landscape, as tracked by The 451 Group, and examines the business and technology trends driving this market. It identifies 10 key technology trends in data warehousing and assesses how they can be used to choose the technologies and vendors that are best suited to a would-be customer and its specific application.

During the webinar I will present some details of those ten key trends and how we see consensus forming around some technologies that have previous divided the industry, enabling the conversation to move on to business-oriented issues. As the market continues to mature, differentiation among vendors will shift from a focus on specific technologies to a reflection of various business processes.

The webinar is scheduled for Thursday, December 17th, at 1 pm ET. I will present for about 30 minutes, followed by Q&A.

If you are interested you can register for the event, and download an executive summary of the report, here.

There is healthy competition in data warehousing, with more than 20 vendors competing for the attention of would-be customers with a variety of technologies, architectures and implementation methodologies.

With choice comes potential confusion, since users have to identify and compare different products and features, as well as vendor viability, to ensure they are investing their IT budgets wisely – especially in the current economic climate.

Our latest special report, Warehouse Optimization – Ten considerations for choosing/building a data warehouse, is designed to help reduce that confusion and is now available for existing 451 Group clients to download and non-clients to purchase. An executive summary is also available.

The report provides an overview of the data-warehousing vendor landscape, as tracked by The 451 Group, and examines the business and technology trends driving this market. It identifies 10 key technology trends in data warehousing and assesses how they can be used to choose the technologies and vendors that are best suited to a would-be customer and its specific application.

The report is not designed to make recommendations on particular vendors or technologies, but to provide an independent overview of the sector, which could be used by customers as part of a vendor-evaluation process. The report also examines the potential for consolidation and identifies some potential merger and acquisition drivers, as well as providing profiles of the data-warehousing vendors being tracked by The 451 Group as part of its ongoing coverage of this sector.

Look out also for a forthcoming webinar in which we will present the key findings and implications. We’ll keep you posted on the details.

Since the start of this year I’ve been covering data warehousing as part of The 451 Group’s information management practice, adding to my ongoing coverage of  databases, data caching, and CEP, and contributing to the CAOS research practice.

I’ve covered data warehousing before but taking a fresh look at this space in recent months it’s been fascinating to see the variety of technologies and strategies that vendors are applying to the data warehousing problem. It’s also been interesting to compare the role that open source has played in the data warehousing market, compared to the database market.

I’m preparing a major report on the data warehousing sector, for publication in the next couple of months. In preparartion for that I’ve published a rough outline of the role open source has played in the sector over on our CAOS Theory blog. Any comments or corrections much appreciated.