It’s been more than a week since PARTNERS concluded, and I’m still coming down from my Teradata buzz. At numerous presentations and informal chats, I learned about the exciting, innovative ways Teradata users are leveraging data. That’s certainly a theme for anyone familiar with Teradata Magazine. But even when I think I’ve heard it all, I learned in one session about a retailer that has developed a formula to predict sales of items down to the hour of the day. As a result, analysts will be able to track items that are selling at an atypical rate or when something is about to become out of stock at one of its stores. They will then be able to alert the store manager before the day’s purchase orders are made. This was just one of many innovations I learned about. As I sift through my copious notes, I find myriad nuggets of these types of ingenious initiatives.

At the same time, I met so many dedicated, brilliant business intelligence (BI) professionals. It was a veritable who’s who of data warehousing’s best and brightest—consultants, thought leaders and industry analysts, as well as Teradata’s customers, partners and associates—too many to name. Many of these luminaries have contributed or plan to contribute to Teradata Magazine, which is exciting. But even more rewarding was the positive feedback I received regarding the magazine. It’s high praise indeed coming from this group.

Alas, however, this moment in time is over, and all we can do is wait until next year for PARTNERS 2010, which is Oct. 24-28 in San Diego. Or do we?

For those of us who want relive PARTNERS—or those who couldn’t make the event—more options than ever are available to tap into this experience. Event photos can be seen at Flickr.

Several complete sessions can be viewed at Ustream. And short video reports and more are available on YouTube.  Bringing together all of these social networking threads—along with blog posts from the conference—is a new interactive online hub, PARTNERS Connect.

So while PARTNERS 2009 may be over, opportunities remain to gain insight from the event, and gear up for 2010.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Data is everywhere. This is not news to me, but after attending this, my first PARTNERS conference, I now better understand its relevance. Data is more than simply a customer’s name or number, address or even buying habits. Organizations that use data analytics to their advantage can move past reporting what happened and toward proactively predicting what will or might happen.

During his session “Rethinking BI to Drive Better Decisions,” Gartner’s Garret Herschel explained that most decisions are driven by events—a product’s life cycle, the budget process, etc. The challenge lies in the unplanned events. Instead of dealing with symptoms, he said, organizations should identify the causes of their challenges so they can prevent them in the future.

After listening to Herschel’s presentation, I really began thinking about Teradata customers. What do they use the company’s solutions to enable them to do? Here are some examples based on sessions I attended:

France’s Bouygues Telecom combined disparate databases into a large Teradata enterprise data warehouse (EDW) that is one of the largest in France. The telco did so to reduce costs, improve service levels, share operational data, improve access, become more agile and benefit from operational BI.

Telefonica Chile is part of Telefonica, the largest Spanish telco, which boasts 260 million customers through Europe and Latin America. Telefonica Chile is using Teradata Relationship Manager to reduce customer churn.

The United States Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Transportation Command deployed a Teradata EDW to modernize aging legacy systems and help the agencies better plan workflows—again through predictive analytics.

STIF, the government organization responsible for public transportation in Paris, implemented its EDW to help reduce the cost of marketing campaigns and centralize information on transportation use and organization routes. Using Oracle Data Integrator as the data hub, a Teradata EDW and IBM Cognos reporting tools, the organization is working to better analyze traffic and identify trends.

After this conference, I may never look at Facebook, my hotel room key or even my doctor’s office in the same way. All three have my data—different parts of it, but it’s data about me nonetheless. I wonder if the next time I stay at this hotel, the room service will be ready with my oatmeal and fresh fruit, predicting that I will place that breakfast order for delivery at 7 a.m. I’ll let you know.

Let us know if you’re doing something cool with your data that we can highlight in Teradata Magazine. We’re always looking for great stories about the ways customers use Teradata technology to improve their organizations.

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

Economist, author and actor Ben Stein, likely most famous for his role in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (remember “Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?”), sees doom and hope simultaneously. Known for his dry delivery, Stein took the stage at PARTNERS today to deliver a keynote address to a packed room.

Stein touched on the decline of education in the United States. A teacher for several years, Stein told the audience he gave up the profession because students didn’t do their homework. As evidence to support his point, he cited a study that says that one-quarter of U.S. high school students are capable of obtaining C’s in college. And then he told of his experience with a reality-type TV show starring models, two of whom he spoke to who didn’t know when World War II was or what language was spoken in London.

This is in contrast with Don Tapscott, who spoke Monday, telling the audience that this generation of students is the smartest despite their use of video games and online learning aids. Putting the two on stage together might be an interesting event.

An economist at heart, Stein says that at the end of the day we have no idea what will help turn things around: “You can watch CNBC all day long, but we don’t know what really works to stimulate the economy.”

Small-business lending is down, another indicator Stein perceives as negative. Couple that with the uncertainty about President Obama’s healthcare plan and the possible nuclear armament of Iran and other “mortal enemies,” and Stein isn’t seeing a bright future.

Where, then, lies hope for this country? Stein sees it in what he calls “real stars.” He’s not talking about the TV and movie stars who make their living in Hollywood. Instead he’s referring to the men and women who daily don body armor and risk their lives for little pay in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

During his frequent trips to Washington, D.C. (the site of this year’s PARTNERS conference), Stein, a resident of Malibu, Calif., frequently stops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he visits with hospitalized soldiers and their families, which he refers to as the “backbone of the United States of America.”

Of the soldiers, along with police officers, firefighters and teachers, Stein says, “It is in their hearts, in their courage and their sacrifice that salvation lies.”

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

Last fall’s U.S. election cast a spotlight on technology, making it a focal point for politicians as well as the electorate. Data is the enormous story, and its applicability to our everyday lives is examined in Stephen Baker’s book, “The Numerati.” Baker, a senior writer for BusinessWeek, wrote the book after researching a mathematics article for the magazine. He posits that through understanding data, people will better understand themselves.

Some car insurers, for example, are giving drivers the option of installing a “black box” in their cars to monitor driving habits. In exchange for doing so, the drivers receive a discount. Those who want to remain anonymous are going to pay more down the road, according to Baker.

Baker was part of a technology in government panel held at the National Press Club today. Joining him on the panel, which was moderated by Teradata Vice President of Government Affairs Tim Day, were Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst and Stephen Horne, vice president, Master Data Management and Integration Services, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.

Myriad areas of government could benefit from increased transparency and accountability, according to the panel members. Brobst used healthcare as his example, saying that using the past to predict the future and then making decisions based on the analysis of that data could be used to make healthcare more proactive.

Horne focused on financial reporting issues. The government is what he described as “data rich and information poor.” Scores of reports are generated each year in accordance with government regulations, but they simply sit on shelves. No attempts are made to take that data and use it to solve problems. HR 1242 has been introduced in an attempt to change this, creating a database that could then be analyzed to provide meaningful, actionable information, Horne says.

While individual pieces of data may not mean anything, larger amounts of data from multiple points, once filtered to get to the truth, can lead to major insights, according to Horne.

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

This is my first PARTNERS conference. I have long known about the passion Teradata employees feel about their company and its products. But I am blown away by customers’ love of all things orange.

At a reception last night, I was chatting with a senior application developer for a company that uses Teradata extensively. Her face positively lit up when she explained how she developed a Web-based dashboard for sales and management use.

Speaking of passion and orange, James Vollmer, chair of the PARTNERS Steering Committee, made quite an entrance at the general session when he drove on stage in an orange sports car adorned with the PARTNERS logo. Vollmer, who professes to be a farm boy, explained how his company, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, reused its existing tools in innovative ways to increase the organization’s agility.

Enterprise’s Automated Rental System was developed to improve customer satisfaction by defining inefficiencies through the analysis of, among other data, how long customers’ cars were in the shop for service. This information is important to insurance companies, repair shops and, of course, Enterprise.

Furthering the innovation theme, Computerworld announced the winners of its Enterprise Intelligence Awards program, which honors best practices in the use of information technology solutions built on Teradata platforms. AT&T received top honors in Customer Intelligence and Management. RBC Financial Group topped the Excellence in BI and Analytics category. The Government and Non-Profit award went to the United States Postal Service. ARC was honored for Industry Innovation. And Australian Pharmaceutical Industries took first in the Integrated View of the Business group.

All of these customers are driving innovation at their companies. Teradata President and CEO Mike Koehler echoed the message of innovation, saying that cutting costs is easy to do, but innovating and growing a business is difficult. As a company, Teradata continues to lead. Koehler’s examples: Teradata 13, Teradata Virtual Storage, the new Solid State Drive Appliance—aptly dubbed “BLURR”—and new Amazon cloud solutions.

How has Teradata helped your company innovate? Which of the new products is your company deploying? We’d love to hear from you.

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

One of the great things about a conference like PARTNERS is the networking opportunity it provides. Attendees connect throughout the conference in myriad ways—including in and after sessions, during planned networking events and during meals. Other fantastic opportunities, like the Teradata Cares program and the annual golf tournament allow attendees to give back while they make contacts.

Yesterday’s second annual Bike Brigade at PARTNERS 2009 started the conference off on the right note, er, pedal. Approximately 18 Teradata employees, customers and business partners built a total of 35 bikes as part of the Teradata Cares program. The bikes were donated to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington for the club’s Be Great program.

Teradata Cares is also looking for school supply donations as part of the Math Matters campaign, which last year provided supplies to more than 300 children in the Las Vegas community. This year’s Web based program benefits Kits for Kidz, which provides school supplies for underprivileged children in the Washginton, D.C. area. To donate and help Teradata Cares reach its goal of providing supplies for 500 children.

Another way that PARTNERS attendees are making a difference is on the golf course. The annual Driving for Higher Education Golf Tournament was held at National Golf Club at Tantallon and benefited the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. Golfers took to the links at Tantallon, one of the premier golf resorts in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
If you have participated in any of these great programs, let us know why you did it and what you thought of the experience. We’d love to hear from you.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sean Slack, a Teradata employee, makes few final adjustments to a bike for its new owner from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. They earned their bikes through the club’s Be Great program. The bikes were donated by Teradata Corporation, a DC-area employer.

Throughout the year, we each revolve separately in our own little solar systems. But once a year, all the stars in this galaxy called the Teradata PARTNERS User Group align to become one brilliant and powerful display.

Our lives are inexorably entwined through our data warehousing connections and for a few days we’ll draw together at the PARTNERS Conference & Expo to share our collective wisdom and goodwill. We’ll be both pupil and teacher; competitor and friend. This is my destiny. There’s no place I’d rather be.

Teradata Magazine has a lot going on. From casual tweets to formal interviews for articles, we’ll be doing it all. But of course, our primary focus will be on you--to find out what readers want to see most in the publication. We hope to have the opportunity to talk with you there but even if you're not making the trip in person, you can be right in the middle of the action through PARTNERS Connect where you can check out news, tweets, pics and brand new for 2009, you can even catch some of the sessions as live, streaming broadcasts.

I've seen lots of firsts and bests at the Conference over the years. Honestly, I can't say there was a "most memorable" moment. Although there was that time when a customer's story made the interviewer cry... and the sight of my boss's boss face as we pulled into the station after the Hulk ride...

Obviously, the Conference is what YOU make of it. Do you have a favorite memory--one that you think nobody could top?

Sandra Worley
Executive Editor, Teradata Magazine