Top 10 information management stories of 2019

Consolidation and acquisition marked the supplier side of the IT industry in respect of information management in 2019.

Hadoop distributors Cloudera and Hortonworks sealed their marriage, announced in 2018, while on the business intelligence (BI) and analytics side of the market, Tableau was sold to Salesforce, and the sale of Looker to Google was also announced. And MapR, the third of the most prominent distributors of big data storage system Hadoop, collapsed into HPE.

On the user side of the market, we saw the continued search for business value from the big data revolution that has been proceeding since at least the birth of Hadoop in 2006. Computer Weekly was represented on a springtime visit to Silicon Valley, where we discovered a group of companies attempting address gaps in the value chain from data sources to business insight.

That visit also provoked the question: what is the balance, for enterprise IT, between complementing and replacing traditional databases? An article by Lindsay Clark assayed an answer to that question later in the year.

The question of how modern BI and analytics software – roughly speaking, software that post-dates the heyday of traditional BI software in the early 2000s – shapes up to non-relational big data is addressed and suggests that data integration is the enduring, difficult problem for CIOs to solve.

Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 information management stories of 2019.