GoldenGate Software Inc., a leading provider of high availability and real-time data integration solutions, has announced the results of a recent survey, Moving From Analytics to Operational Business Intelligence: The Changing Role of the Data Warehouse, produced by Unisphere Research and the International DB2 Users Group (IDUG), in cooperation with GoldenGate Software. The survey finds that while many organisations have an established data warehouse, the demand for operational business intelligence impacting a wider range of decision makers across the enterpriseis increasing. Operational business intelligence (BI) is defined as the effort to integrate analytical and trend information with operational processes to enable more informed and real-time decision making. As the data warehouse evolved into a routine component of IT practices, a centralised data repository used by sophisticated analysts was no longer sufficient. In order to conduct data analysis for day-to-day operational business processes, organisations demanded that BI capabilities be available for a broader number of staff and front-line decision makers, which is where operational BI has emerged as a competitive advantage. The recent research study takes a closer look at how organisations are using their data warehouses and the underlying infrastructure and data acquisition approaches and technologies, in addition to the level of availability for the warehouse. Completed by 413 respondents from a broad range of industries, some key findings in the survey are: - More than 80 percent of respondents indicated that their enterprises support a data warehouse - Almost half of the data warehouses are growing between 10 and 50 percent annually - More than 25 percent of respondents have between one and five terabytes of data stored in their data warehouses - Twenty percent of respondents reported that more than 500 people access the data in their data warehouses - 31 percent indicated that data warehousing served as the foundation for more than 150 reports each month - More than 40 percent of respondents indicated that they have more than ten different sources populating the data warehouse - A little more than half of the respondents indicated that their data warehouse currently supports operational business intelligence applications - More than 90 percent of these respondents anticipate increased use of operational business intelligence over the next year Another surprising finding of the survey is that fifty percent of survey respondents said it would take a full day to recover from an outage, while less than nine percent could recover immediately. According to GoldenGate as the data warehouse becomes a more heavily used system across all areas of the business, continuous access will be a critical feature, not to mention a competitive advantage. To request an executive summary of the survey, Moving From Analytics to Operational Busine