The data warehousing industry will reach “what could well be its most significant inflection point since its inception” in 2011, according to analyst company Gartner.

Analytical databases are finding new applications beyond traditional business intelligence, said analyst Donald Feinberg, including operational analytics and corporate performance management.

Consequently, Feinberg predicts that data warehousing products will evolve to expand in functionality to
include information management tasks as well as analytical operations.

“We predict that data warehouse DBMS vendors will combine their offerings to become something more like an information management platform,” he wrote. “The DBMS will become, above all else, an execution platform. It will support and perform data management and integration tasks as well as for query and analysis execution.”