30 March 2011 Americas/United States Equity Research Software (Software/Software & Services) / OVERWEIGHT/OVERWEIGHT The Need for Speed Research Analysts SECTOR REVIEW Philip Winslow, CFA 212 325 6157
[email protected] How In-Memory and Flash Could Transform IT Dennis Simson, CFA 212 325 0930 Architectures and Drive the Next "Killer Apps"
[email protected] Speed Kills. Enterprises have traditionally concentrated on implementing Sitikantha Panigrahi 415 249 7932 enterprise applications that primarily automate back-office processes to provide
[email protected] specific efficiencies, but today’s economy demands better integration between transactional data and real-time, operational analytics to react to dynamic business trends. Although current applications have become the “systems of record” for business data, the infrastructure underneath current databases lacks the performance to leverage this data for real-time analytics, due to the fact that traditional data warehouses run on relatively slow hard drives, resulting in query response times often stretching to multiple hours or days on data that is often days or weeks out of date. The need to process more data faster to provide real-time analytics has brought new requirements for database architectures. Vive la Database Révolution! At several points in the history of enterprise IT, the ongoing evolution of hardware technologies reaches a critical mass that results in a radical paradigm shift in software architectures (e.g., from mainframe to client/server). We believe the industry stands at the cusp of the most significant revolution in database and application architectures in 20 years. Driven by the confluence of multiple industry dynamics (e.g., 64-bit addressable memory, the rapid decline of memory prices), we expect columnar databases leveraging in-memory and NAND flash architectures to gain much greater adoption, as these systems can reduce query response times to mere seconds.