DaaS (DBMS as a Service) is yet another acronym that I pray will not catch on, mostly because it doesn't add any value for anybody but the first-adopter vendors. This recent article in InfoWorld tells how database vendor Vertica is collaborating with Amazon on a move to offer its database management system (DBMS) as a hosted service on Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing Infrastructure (EC2), a take on Software as a Service (SaaS), etc, etc. The net here is that what costs ~$150K/month to host a 500GB 1TB [edit] data warehouse inside an end-user company gets slashed to $2K/month for a 500GB store [edit]. Of course, these numbers come from the vendor and who KNOWS what creative licensing math went into the ROI calculation [see comment]. But it's compelling. [edit: a Vertica employee corrected a few details, but the story remains compelling. I encourage you to read the InfoWorld article (link above) and his comment.]
Here's the Donald Feinberg (Gartner Group) analysis:
Cloud-hosted database management systems (DMBS) hold little value to the end-user type IT and department-level organizations. [...] Another, although related to the software vendor, is when a BI app vendor puts their app on top of Vertica and sells to their clients as a package. [...] They could now sell just to the end-user (bypassing IT and red tape) and install it fast with the correct resources for the end-users on EC2, assist the end-user loading data and the users are off and running.
That's interesting - take IT out of the BI mix and you have end-users getting to their "one version of the truth" using a packaged software. So long as the tools / data can support reporting without an inherent "slice & dice your way to fun and profit!" capability, I think this is good. But the IT Analysts will remain involved in the setup of such instances until there exist Business Analysts not influenced by sales & marketing execs. Call me paranoid.
Tue, 05/13/2008 - 05:27
I'm with Vertica. The $150K vs. $2K/mo reported in InfoWorld isn't an apples to apples comparison.
We do charge $2K/mo to manage up to 500GB using Vertica for the Cloud.
However, the $150K charge InfoWorld reported, is actually the cost for managing a terabyte of raw user data(not 500GB)on a perpetual basis, in-house.
In either case, we charge based on the amount of raw user data (which gets compressed heavily by the database). There are no extra charges for replicating the data (which Vertica does automatically) or re-configurig the hardware on which Vertica runs (i.e., adding servers/CPUs, in in-house/non-cloud deployments).