By Sam Gaines

What is the shared quest between Accenture, a world leader in management technology and services, and Teradata? A common vision being put into action, according to Richard Lawrence, leadership partner in Accenture’s Customer Insight/CRM practice. “Accenture’s point of view is one of marketing transformation, which includes the essential elements of the integrated view of the customer, customer decision analytics and optimized customer interactions,” Lawrence says.

Kenneth L. Reed: “We deploy specific tools to underpin customer insight delivery at every level.”

When it comes to marketing transformation—and a host of other innovative approaches to enhancing business responsiveness and efficiency—Accenture is a recognized leader. The $11.4 billion concern applies its world-leading expertise to companies both large and small, across 18 focused industry groups. Its client list includes 86 of the Fortune 100 and more than half of the Fortune 500.

Lawrence explains that the “integrated view of the customer” engages each of its components in multiple ways. “We think about marketing transformation across these components,” he says. “So we deploy specific tools to underpin customer insight delivery at every level. For example, the customer interaction component is enabled through campaign management tools.”

“With Teradata, we’re addressing all aspects of this vision,” Lawrence says. “It is uniquely well-positioned because it looks across those elements to provide the enabling infrastructure and tools to address those components. It is a very robust set of tools uniquely able to deliver our vision.”

Accenture Associate Partner Kenneth L. Reed, who manages operations of the Customer Analytics practice (within the Customer Insight practice) for Accenture, echoes that assessment. Reed’s people now have the power to maximize the effectiveness of the third normal form model in Accenture’s Minneapolis testing lab. “We can develop really special approaches to our CRM work by leveraging Teradata power and tools,” Reed says. “It’s become a cornerstone to our practice because we are able to leverage it far beyond any other database platform we could use.”

Part of that power is nested in Teradata’s ramp-up speed for new users. “Most of our own people were not skilled in Teradata when we first implemented the platform, so we had concerns about that. But one of this system’s advantages is that just about anyone (can use it), and that’s remarkable for a platform as potentially huge and complex as it is.”

For the customer-centric business, the advantages of a database platform providing nearly real-time, accurate data—and the tools to mine that data rigorously—are clear: better competitive intelligence, the power to tailor marketing efforts to single-customer specifics, and the data-to-action speed to realize value from your efforts faster than ever. Teradata’s industry-benchmark 360-degree customer view provides a comprehensive, up-to-date profile that is as reliable as it is easy to create.

Another key advantage is scalability. “Being able to scale Teradata is a critical factor for CRM,” Reed says. “Many clients work on legacy platforms, so they can’t build a customer-centric warehouse with their older software. I see incredible compromises as a result, with partitioned data sets that get out of sync, but that’s the way it must be done in these cases. It makes it impossible to build the sort of marketing campaign that can gain info on what your clients are doing.

“Not a problem with Teradata, though. In a central spot, we draw all the information we need to determine how we’re doing with the customer, what products and services are the right ones to offer that customer, and even who we need to leave alone. All our clients using this customer-centric approach have realized significant positive impact on their ROI.” T