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