In somewhat of a 'dah!' moment it struck me: Why are we seeing the enterprise software vendors coming out with appliances? Well the marketing literature touts the ROI and TCO of pre-installed, preconfigured software on commodity hardware but I doubt the software vendors are acting with this motivation alone.  One reason very well might be the way existing software maintenance contracts are written.  After all these new 'appliances' are not just software.

One example is the Business Intelligence Accelerator from SAP (BI-A).  Once you get past the eye popping query performance improvements you'll notice that the aggregation engine is the same TREX search engine found in NetWeaver only repurposed for BI and put on commodity hardware.

Naeem Hashmi debunked some of the misconceptions spawned by comments from SAP's Shai Agassi.  Enjoy the paper. 

The SAP marketing lit makes mention of collaboration with Intel on this technology development. Anybody out there hacked through TREX and repurposed it for BI aggregates without collaborating with Intel?  Let me know...