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