But When They're Right...
While I was cleaning out my closet I came upon the 1996 conference proceedings of Gartner's Getting Your Data in Shape event. I thought it might be interesting to see what Gartner was saying back then, and what has transpired since. And guess what? Gartner did a very good job predicting the future. Now I don't want to be seen as a shill for Gartner - and sometimes I'm sure they are not as prescient as they were for this particular event - but having a dedicated team of analysts investigating a field and making informed, reasonable projections can be helpful to IT organizations.
Let's take a look at some of the forward-looking projections I found in this set of proceedings:
This prediction was spot-on. The extended relational products (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, and to a lesser extent Sybase) are the most commonly used DBMS products for most varieties of dat management activities. You might scoff at this prediction and say something like "that was an easy call" - but to be confident of such a prediction over a 10 year span is impressive.
Not bad here either. Remember, this planning assumption was made during the age of the big "R" Repository - Platinum technology was touting their Repository, Microsoft was making noise about theirs, and repositories were being viewed as the glue that holds the IT infrastructure together. Of course, the big "r" repository has basically died and no real "robust" solution has been delivered. CMDB seems to have supplanted repository as the term du jour in this area.
For the most part, this has come true, too. The specialty DBMS products (e.g. Red Brick and Arbor) are either gone or surviving only on the periphery.
This statement was made at a time when the general consensus was that client/server implementations would be a lot less costly than mainframe implementations. And though Gartner doesn't use these terms specifically, they are basically saying that management of distributed systems is complex and costly. A good call.
I've been quoting this nugget in my presentations for some time now. And it is true. There is always an implementation out there that is straining against the limits of what can be done today - and managed today. Maybe it means something like... it would take longer to recover the database than to rebuild it from scratch so we don't back it up. But once again, a good piece of knowledge from Gartner.
Overall, the information in these proceedings would have been very worthwhile to an IT department in 1996 that was trying to establish its budgeting and planning for the future. So, skepticism is a virtue, but sometimes analytical "guesses" can be helpful... just don't bet your career on them!
© 2006, Mullins Consulting, Inc.
