Should Big Data Warehouse Vendors be Worried about Redshift?
David Linthicum- Monday, February 18, 2013
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As Barb Darrow reports, “Redshift, based on technology from ParAccel, claims to offer big-time data warehouse capability for a tenth of the price of legacy suppliers and, as of today, customers can start finding out for themselves if it lives up to the hype. If it does, it will uphold Amazon’s reputation for disrupting tech giants. Redshift availability was announced on the AWS blog.”
So, should HP, IBM, Teradata, and Oracle be shaking in their boots? I think they should.
The reality is that database technology license costs have been a huge part of the IT budgets in the last 20 years. We called it the “database tax.”
The reason we paid that tax was due to the fact that we had no choice, there were no cost effective alternatives. Of course, open source databases began to emerge, and now, finally, we have those such as Redshift that are delivered through public cloud services.
So, if Redshift does indeed meet the promises that AWS is making, also as other public cloud-based databases emerge, then there should be clear and more cost-effective alternatives to the big, expensive database technology that’s out there. The trick will be to quickly demonstrate the value, and that is up to those who created Redshift.
