So you thought Neoview’s demise signaled HP’s exit from the enterprise data warehousing (EDW) market? You could not have been more mistaken. 

Yes, HP recently abandoned that slow-motion train wreck after several years of anemic customer adoption and directionless product management. But you should regard the unlamented Neoview as little more than a blip in HP’s long-running campaign to deepen its presence in all things EDW. And you should consider today’s announcement that they’re acquiring Vertica Systems as a key building block in HP’s emerging new strategy in the EDW market. It remains to be seen what that strategy is, inasmuch as new HP CEO Leo Apotheker has not yet articulated a clear vision. Perhaps he’s playing close to the vest so as not to call attention to further acquisitions in adjacent segments, such as business intelligence (BI) and data integration (DI).

I love reporters. As someone with an M.A. in journalism who then evolved into an analyst, I recognize that both professions occupy approximately the same tier in the industry food chain. In fact, many IT industry analysts were trade press reporters at one point in their careers, and it’s not uncommon for analysts to go back into media institutions later on.

When great longtime IT reporters, such as Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan, call me up to get my thoughts, I’m just as interested in their take on what’s important. Jai recently published an excellent article with my predictions, plus those of another analyst, on the year ahead in analytics. To the jaded reader, these sorts of year-end look-ahead articles may feel like perfunctory rehashes of stuff we’ve been telling them for quite some time, perhaps with a trendy new buzzword thrown in to keep it remotely glance-worthy.

I try not to repeat myself too much. Rather than regurgitate the statements I made in the phone interview with Jai, I’ll highlight how I’m addressing the principal business-analytics trends that I discussed with him — self-service, pervasive, social, scalable, cloud, and real-time—in our 2011 Forrester research agenda:

Many large organizations have finally “seen the light” and are trying to figure out the best way to treat their critical data as the trusted asset it should be. As a result, master data management (MDM) strategies, and the enabling architectures, organizational and governance models, methodologies and technologies that support the delivery of MDM capabilities are…in a word…HOT! But the concept of MDM - and the homegrown or vendor-enabled technologies that attempt to deliver that elusive “single version of truth”, “golden record”, or “360-degree view” - has been around for decades in one form or another (e.g., data warehousing, BI, data quality, EII, CRM, ERP, etc. have all at one time or another promised to deliver that single version of truth in one form or another).

The current market view of MDM has matured significantly over the past 5 years, and today many organizations are on their way to successfully delivering multi-domain/multi-form master data solutions across various physical and federated architectural approaches. But the long-term evolution of the MDM concept is far from over. There remains a tremendous gap in what limited business value most MDM efforts deliver today compared to what all MDM and data management evangelists feel MDM is capable of delivering in terms of business optimization, risk mitigation, and competitive differentiation.

What will the next evolution of the MDM concept look like in the next 3, 5 and 10 years? Will the next breakthrough be one that’s focused on technology enablement? How about information architecture? Data governance and stewardship? Alignment with other enterprise IT and business strategies?

Suddenly but not surprisingly, EMC has jumped headlong into the data warehousing (DW) market via strategic acquisition. Now that the deal is in the works, it’s clear that EMC perceived a “low-hanging plum” in one of its established DW partners, and simply made the right offer at the right time.

The EMC/Greenplum deal signals that the DW market is probably moving into a new round of consolidations. Just as Oracle acquired Sun in part to offer fully one-stop integrated DW appliances (i.e., Oracle Exadata over Oracle Sun hardware), EMC comes from the other end of the telescope: acquiring a DW software vendor to layer on top of its hardware and possibly leverage its other software technologies at a later date. In this way, EMC now becomes one of the few DW appliance vendors that can provide a reasonably full stack of hardware and software from its own portfolio.

When I say “reasonably full” in this context, I’m referring to the hardware (EMC is storage, but will still rely on third-parties to provide the server and interconnects), database (Greenplum has extended/customized BizGreSQL), query planning/optimization, data-loading, and workload management (Greenplum has built its own technology in those three areas). In this regard, EMC/Greenplum will be one of several “integrated one-stop hardware/software stack” DW appliance vendors on the market: IBM, Oracle/Sun, and HP are others. Interestingly, all of these vendors also supply hardware to rival “hardware-less” DW appliance vendors, and it’s likely that EMC/Greenplum, like these companies, will offer its own optimized DW-appliance stack while offering an equivalent degree of hardware optimization for partners.