Kognitio has unveiled the findings of an independent survey of 100 UK organisations, uncovering its position on the Data warehousing as a Service (DaaS) delivery model. Despite this innovative approach has only been available for less than a year, it has already positively grabbed the attention of end users.

The most receptive group were the respondents in the retail, distribution, transport and utilities companies, with 44% of respondents happy to switch from the traditional in-house system for a service model. They were followed by the manufacturers, which ticked the yes box in 36% of the cases. Interestingly, the financial services respondents are instead still leaning towards the on-site approach (48%) rather than the new DaaS one (28%); this might be due to the fact that such organisations often have large IT departments and enough resources to purchase, manage and support most systems directly. This theory is also underpinned by the fact that the survey shows that smaller companies tend to prefer the service approach. The Kognitio-commissioned study in fact revealed that 42% of organisations with between 1,000 and 3,000 employees favour the new model, whereas this figure drops to 34% for businesses with a staff greater than 3,000.

“Wherever you look today in the IT industry, we are moving towards a service model; this is a natural evolution because end users no longer want to incur large upfront costs to buy hardware or licence software only then to spend even more money maintaining these solutions,” said Roger Llewellyn, Kognitio’s CEO. “In addition, DaaS is good news for system administrators and data analysts alike; it eliminates the pressures applied by the business on the IT department because users can query the data directly by relying on an outsourced service, and it provides results much quicker than in-house solutions can, usually within days instead of months.”