There is more news indicating that the world economy is recovering. Governments and experts are worried, though, that a loan shortage might choke the fledgling growth that we are seeing. It seems that it’s not so much the fact that many people are poorer than they thought they were two years ago that is holding us back. It’s lost confidence that keeps aggravating and prolonging this recession. Especially small and medium-sized firms find it hard to get the funds they need to finance their operations.

News reaches us from Italy that there is a solution to this problem. Rather than subjecting each and every customer to the risk rating process, Credito Emiliano, a regional bank in Northern Italy, simply accepts a fairly durable commodity as collateral: parmesan cheese. According to Bloomberg, Credito Emiliano keeps cheese worth about 132 million Euros in its climate-controlled “vaults” – a considerable sum. For the producers, that’s very convenient. They can borrow money to make their cheese and pay back the loan up to two years later – which is about the time it needs to mature. For the bank, there is very little risk: in case of a default, it can simply sell the precious parmesan. The arrangement, by the way, isn’t new. Credito Emiliano has been following this practice for decades and deals involving credit and cheese have been struck since the Middle Ages.

So here is one line of business that has no credit problems amid the recession. It’s obvious, though, that this solution wouldn’t work for others. In fact, Credito Emiliano has given up on similar arrangements for ham and olive oil, because these goods are stolen too easily. Parmesan wheels, on the other hand, have serial numbers and can be identified with no trouble. But the most important factor that makes this arrangement so exceptional is probably that the bank actually controls the collateral and knows pretty well in advance how much it will be worth if it should have to sell it. In most cases, banks cannot be so sure about this, and rating the borrower’s assets is usually a very complex exercise. This is not only true for derivative-buying, short-term debtors in the financial markets but also for small businesses and home-owning consumers. The value of parmesan has been quite stable in comparison to house prices in many countries.

Confidence is based on past experiences and sound assumptions about the future. The more accurate these assumptions are and the more reliably credit risks are rated, the more often banks will grant loans again. This is why many actors in the financial sector are making huge efforts and investments to refine their risk management. Because, unfortunately, things cannot always be as easily resolved as in the parmesan business.

Simon Doherty

Most of my conversations during the Washington conference last week were about Teradata’s cloud computing offerings and the significance of the new platform, the first all solid state drive (SSD) data warehouse appliance. We thought that people elsewhere might like to get the same additional explanations, so my colleagues found a quiet corner where they could film one of my conversations and produced a brief video from this material.

If you’re interested you can watch me explain why solid state disks make data warehousing so much faster (it all goes down to the von Neumann problem, as I have written before) and elaborate the difference between private clouds and public clouds. I intend to write a longer post about the latter topic soon, but for the time being you might find this video helpful.

Martin Willcox

The Teradata Partners Conference 2009 is over, and my impression is that I have met a lot of optimistic, and very determined, people. This is no time for enthusiasm, neither in the U.S. nor back home. But the people at this conference generally think they are seeing light at the end of tunnel and are preparing to be ready when more opportunities arise again. It was very inspiring, and shouldn’t I say thank you to our hosts?

The theme of this conference, in my view, was the discrepancy between the abundance and availability of data in many enterprises and government authorities. Knowledge you don’t know you have is wasted. Not putting the small bits together inevitably means you will be missing the big picture. In Washington we have seen enhancements for all the steps that are necessary for data analysis.

The first step is always data integration. And it’s never fully completed. Geospatial data is yet another data type that can be loaded into the data warehouse for analytical purposes. And no doubt there will be more to follow in the future. The second step is to decide what to do with these data. Thanks to the cloud versions introduced this week, business users and developers will have it far easier to make that decision. And they can collaborate via the cloud. The third step is to have the data at your hands when you need them. This is where the new platform, Extreme Performance Appliance 4555 comes in. Its SSD technology speeds it up tremendously, enabling companies, for example, to exploit opportunities even during the briefest interaction with the customer.

Data warehouse is a field that continues to develop fast. There will be Teradata User Group meetings across Europe over the next months and, next spring, our Teradata Universe Conference in Berlin, where we can continue discussing the latest trends. The next Teradata Partners Conference will take place in San Diego – a bit further to the West and very close to Rancho Bernardo with its developers’ centre. See you around, and goodbye from your man in Washington.

Mario Bonardo

So, these are the latest news from Washington! (I always wanted to announce this one day.) The most important news story in town, at least in my view, is this: Teradata now supports cloud computing concepts. With three new tools just introduced at the Partners Conference, you can build cloud environments on Teradata, both private and public ones. This provides business users with easy-to-set-up, short-term virtual data marts to do on-the-spot analyses, possibly in response to a certain business situation. Such a capacity will make enterprises more agile.

These are the tools: Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud allows users to create virtual data marts in a Teradata private cloud environment, where they can do analytics in a “sandbox-style”. This flexibility is enabled, among other things, by Teradata Active System Management, which optimizes priorities between experimental analytics and production workloads. The other two cloud tools make Teradata Express, a free developers’ version of Teradata Database, available in VMware and Amazon EC2 environments. The first one enables internal private clouds for developers and IT operation managers, while the latter is meant for the public sphere to support collaborative work from customers around the world.

The idea behind these tools is that we want to give our customers as many choices as possible to leverage the power of Teradata. Obviously, we think an integrated data warehouse is the best solution for many reason, some of our customers might opt for a different kind of architecture. And we strive to deliver for all needs – the same reason why we introduced our platform family.

Geospatial data
The other big news is that a new Teradata solution, Teradata Geospatial, integrates geospatial data into the Teradata Warehouse, making it possible to analyze them there along with other data. Most data (about 80 percent of corporate data) have a location reference – but until now it has been difficult to extract the whole business value from this. The reason is that geospatial solutions have typically been implemented in departmental silos or data marts. And the analysis of such segregated data inevitably creates untimely, imprecise, and inconsistent business intelligence. The Teradata geospatial solution thus reduces complexity and decision latency, because it eliminates specialized geospatial data marts, unnecessary data movement, and system integration.

This will give new analytic power to business analytics. For example, courier services will find it easier to locate and re-route packages to another address if the customer requests so – thus increasing customer satisfaction. Or have you ever got annoyed because of poor phone receptions in certain areas? Well, other people will certainly have had the same problem. Many have changed their provider because of this – but have they told them why? With geospatial data, mobile phone providers can figure out by themselves and do something against further customer attrition. And there are many more examples like this.

Mario Bonardo

There we are, on the river Potomac, a few miles downstream from the United States’ political centre. Tomorrow, we will venture right into the heart of the capital – one of its cardiac veins, at least – the National Press Club, for a continuation of the testimony I have mentioned in my last post. In the meantime, the data warehousing community has been assembling here in the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center where most of our sessions will take place. For the moment, I can say little more than that the global community looks a great deal bigger than its EMEA subset. I have promised to shake many hands in this city, and I wasn’t idle at last night’s welcome party.

This morning, our CEO Mike Koehler officially welcomed the attendees and put much emphasis on speed, or rather on timely availability of information. It’s one matter, for example, to know your customer in detail, and another matter to be able to utilize this knowledge while the customer is visiting your website. During this short period, you might want to find out what would be the right offers (or ads) for this customer at this very moment, before the customer leaves your site. To do this, you will have to analyse both the click-through data and the rest of your customer data. This requires real-time capacities that used to be rather expensive. The technical reason for this is that, at some level, hard disk drives are a bottleneck in any data warehouse architecture, as Martin Willcox has elaborated in one of his posts on this blog. Teradata has found a faster way of breaking through this “sonic wall” by utilizing solid state drive (SSD) technology, for our new Extreme Performance Appliance 4555. Unlike hard drives with their electro-mechanical tasks, flash drives don’t produce delays when writing and reading data, making intelligent responses to browsing behaviour much easier to realize than before. It’s a neat innovation that makes the solution to many business problems much more affordable than before.

The rest of today’s agenda is pretty packed with more sessions, media briefings and, tonight, the Partner Impact Awards ceremony. I’ll bring you up to date with some these events tomorrow morning. Which is sometime tomorrow afternoon for you, depending on where you are in the EMEA region.

Mario Bonardo

This is just a quick note to say that I will be at the Teradata Partners Conference in Washington D.C. next week and, unless I meet you there, I will keep you up to date with some of the latest conference news, gossip and wonders on this blog. Please bear in mind that it’s the world’s largest data warehousing conference that I am talking about, so I can’t promise to give you anything that resembles a complete picture. Instead, I shall try and shake a few of the many hands that there are to shake in that city and generally be your ‘Man in Washington’. As long as you don’t expect me to leave the conference centre for this.

From a European perspective, Washington D.C. may seem to be worlds away, beyond the great pond. American colleagues from the West Coast, though, correctly point out that they aren’t any nearer to the East Coast (in terms of flight time) than, for instance, London. Still, I am especially curious about the American flair and share of this global conference: the technology trends, the potential new partner firms plus the general vibes in the halls when the attention turns to the economic recovery in the US and elsewhere.

I think it has been a smart idea to hold this conference in the U.S. capital considering that the credit crunch has created an exceptionally high awareness of the cost that can result from ill-informed decisions. Powerful legislative watchdogs like the House Committee on Financial Services have become interested in the use of data warehousing both for the general oversight of the financial sector and the U.S. government’s own bail-out scheme TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). Teradata has recently given expert testimony to the House of Representatives on this matter. And I guess holding the Partners Conference more or less next-door makes it easier to intensify the dialogue with political decision-makers than it would have been in the deserts of Nevada. But then again, maybe this is my European view, exaggerating the importance of space and places in the country of ultimate mobility. We’ll see.

Anyway, the Teradata Partners will begin on Sunday afternoon, and I intend to post my first impressions on the following morning – which will probably be during the afternoon in European time. Then I will inform you what has happened over here while you were sleeping. So you’ll hear from me soon!

Mario Bonardo

Is there a “carbon dividend” for the weak economy – a reduction in CO2 emissions due to less economic activity? I would really like to know. If you have followed the recent G20 summit, you may have noticed that in spite of the rampant recession the issue of carbon dioxide emissions was still on the agenda, along with international stimulus packages and banking rules. For good reasons. The perils of global warming are still there and, in the future, we will have to pay a great deal more attention to the balance between prosperity and sustainability that we strike. And I, for one, want to be able to do this in an informed way. I want the facts at hand, just as anyone of our business intelligence customers wants his employees to make informed decisions. Maybe we will have this sooner than many people expect.

For there is an interesting discrepancy here: We are used to hearing (from political commentators, after events like the G20) that not enough progress has been made on the climate issue. But what seems to elude these commentators completely is the progress made outside the political sphere, in the private sector. More and more companies, start-ups as well as long-established ones, are discovering that ecologic solutions can be real business. Taking a hands-on approach, they are coming up with more and more workable ideas to measure and reduce their carbon emissions.

Sabre, an American company that offers travel management and services, is an good example for this. Its computer reservation system enables clients such as travel agents to check the availability of flights, railway ticket and hotel beds and, of course, book them online. With all of the necessary data being available in its Teradata Warehouse, Sabre has developed a sophisticated carbon calculator that estimates the total CO2 emission caused by these activities.

Sabre can now extend its service to travel agents by providing additional information that may be relevant to a growing number of eco-sensitive customers, including corporations with a green travelling policy. They will prefer airlines with cleaner aircraft, the most direct flight routes and, if available, generally less energy-intensive means of travel. Such a service will also help these corporations to generate the exact carbon footprint they want to have. And that’s not the end of it: Sabre could make use of its extensive database to find best green practices for a broad variety of clients. As for private travellers: they will be able to make their personal trade-offs between price, speed and climate-friendliness according to their personal preferences. And take satisfaction in their virtual “carbon dividend” if they choose to.

Here in Europe we are also currently working with a number of manufacturing companies to track at a detailed level the carbon footprint of each individual unit produced (materials, transportation, etc) so that can be audited and even exposed to the consumer, proving that Green initiatives are now seen as both good business and social sense by leading companies.

Niall O’Doherty