MS BI Appliance Solution - HP Business Decision Appliance

Recently Microsoft announced availability of a new appliance solution known as "HP Business Decision Appliance", which can be seen as next product after Parallel Data Warehouse solution. HP has been a partner even in the Parallel Data Warehouse solution, and this solution has been developed in the exclusive alliance between Microsoft and HP. Though the purpose both of these appliance solution serves are quite different, the common characteristic is that both of these solutions are powered using SQL Server in one or another way, and the purpose it serves primarily is business intelligence. You can learn more about this solution from the announcement published here.

In case you intend to learn still more about this solution, here is an announcement from SQL Server Appliance Engineering Team, where you can also watch two screencasts explaining the details of this solution. A flavor of Appliance Engineering Team resides in the CoE (Center of Excellence) of every organization, it's just that most of the organizations do not provide right nurturing to it. Solution offerings in the form of appliance solutions is a growing market, and there are already few market players who are engaging alliances with local vendors to develop appliance solution to tap a market that has not been explored / exploited to it's maximum potential.

Big IT players, can definitely harness the potential of such markets by strategically aligning CoEs in the area of developing solution offerings in the form of appliance solution. In my views, standardized appliance solutions are an ideal candidate for consideration as a value-added service in addition to the regular IT services.

Appliance solution market is one such place where aspiring entrepreneurs, can make their entry into the IT business too. Most of the developers who work in IT factories housing thousands of employees, aspire to start some sort of business in IT. Working Capital is one of the biggest challenge that a service classed person faces to start a business. The first step can be to develop a tool / component and start business by licensing the same to clients. Once you grow in this field and you have a reasonable and modest working capital, appliance solution is another business that IT developers can venture.