My sentiment analysis research on the ODBC/JDBC application landscape produced some interesting results.  The rationale for this project was to leverage our customer data to help SaaS, BigData and other vendors predict patterns for data consumption and make the world a better place.  For example, I was talking to an ISV with both hosted and on-premise solutions for SMBs in healthcare.  In planning a data access strategy, we were able to advise on what infrastructure their user base is running to make adoption easy.

We are a data access company

Our view of the data connectivity landscape is unrivaled since our technology is vendor neutral and runs in virtually every organization across the globe.  The sentiment analysis discussed in this article is based on a count of unique direct end user account records with matching textual data and analyzed by industry, company size, and time over the last 10 years.  This data is not intended to compare and contrast the popularity of different solutions.

3 trends that surprised me

1. Desktop Application Market.  The number of shops looking to connect to sources from desktop applications grew 37.7% over the last 5 years including Microsoft Office, Data Visualization, Data Modeling, and Ad Hoc SQL Tools.  I found this surprising given the trend to move processing power to server and cloud.  I suspect this trend is being driven by the release of DataDirect Connect XE for ODBC Salesforce.com driver over the same period; and it will continue to grow with the release of DataDirect Cloud.

2. Healthcare Data Integration.  ETL Data Integration projects accounted for 31.37% of projects in the healthcare industry the last 5 years which is the highest of any vertical.  Perhaps this is expected given the shift to electronic health records in the industry.  Laura Madsen and Dr. Nemani Rao published an article concluding that, "ETL is critical to the success of any data warehouse project, particularly for healthcare, because so many transformations are needed to ensure that the data is usable for end users."

Additionally, I will be hosting Jim Kosloskey, MD Anderson Cancer Center at Progress Exchange in Boston Oct 6-9 to learn about his experiences with data integration in healthcare.

3. Financial Services Intelligence. 40.28% of projects in financial services across Banking, Capital Markets, and Insurance were related to enterprise Business Intelligence platforms.  At first, I was surprised at the large percentage; but in drilling down to the details; different business units within the same bank  were often running different intelligence platforms.  In response to this trend, we published a white paper on Connectivity Solutions for Financial Services.

Sample set of applications considered in the research: Ab Initio, DataStage, Informatica, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), SAP Data Services, Oracle Data Integrator, Teradata Parallel Transporter, Talend, Pentaho Data Integrator, Business Objects, Cognos, OBIEE, Microstrategy, Pentaho, JasperSoft, SSRS, Tableau, Qlikview, Spotfire, Crystal Reports, SQL Server Linked Server, Oracle Database Gateway, Sybase ECDA, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access, Unica Campaign Affinium, Toad, DB Visualizer, CA Erwin, WinSQL, Aqua Data Studio, SAS, SPSS

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