Just like Goldilocks and the Three Bears we are looking at what is too hot, too cold and just right. So far we have discussed our forecast for the top BI & DW trends for 2009 and the top hyped trends that will splash across industry pundits’ articles, blog posts, Tweets and white papers.

Now it is time to discuss the emerging trends for 2009. Some of these trends will be hyped while others fall below people’s radar, but the common trait is that these trends will make headway in being successfully integrated into companies’ BI & DW portfolios. Still, these trends will not “cross the chasm” and get into the mainstream.

Eventually many of these trends will become part of the industry’s mainstream, but it takes time for emerging processes, practices and products to make the chasm crossing. Constrained IT budgets along with layoffs or hiring freezes at many companies will further exacerbate the time it will take for these trends to become mainstream.

Advocates will claim that a recession is the perfect time to implement many of these trends. Although I generally concur with their arguments, you have to keep in mind that “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” In tough times, the tendency is to play it safe and stay with what you know. The other tendency is to hold off on doing anything until the economy improves. Both of these tendencies constrain mass market adoption.

The 8 for ’09 emerging trends that will (continue) to emerge in our industry:

1. Data governance slowly continues to emerge
2. Moving beyond relational databases
3. Open Source Software (OSS) adoption increases
4. On-Demand Software interest expands
5. Excel becomes an accepted tool in a BI portfolio
6. Solutions rule over tools
7. DW appliances expand business analytics
8. Data integration services overtakes data services 
9. Data silos start to crumble (just kidding!)                

I’ll write more about each of these during 2009.

There will be companies that explore and adopt these trends during this year. As with anything new, there will be some successes and missteps. As the industry learns from these successes and the economy rebounds look for some of these emerging trends to near “crossing the chasm” (but not in 2009.)