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The human touch
Teradata consultants can help you make
the most of Teradata Warehouse 8.0.
by Patric Helmaan
The sheer size and scope of Teradata Warehouse 8.0 and Teradata Database V2R6's innovations and enhancements can be overwhelming, but they are easily put into perspective with the help of Teradata's Professional Services and Customer Services consultants.
"There's a lot more than hardware and software involved in a data warehouse
release," says Todd Higginson, manager of Teradata Professional Services
Marketing. "Our market-leading platform capabilities are matched by the
knowledge base our consultants have developed in the field. And in turn,
our field consultants help guide the development of new features based on
their experiences with customers."
Teradata's services help customers deploy and implement the products effectively and efficiently based on actual customer business practices and needs. "While these releases may be new to the customer, they are familiar to the consultants, who can recognize the best opportunities for a proactive implementation plan," says Higginson.
Kevin Lewis, director of Teradata Customer Services and service offer management, agrees, saying, "All of our offerings leverage traditional and existing services, ensuring that the new release enables customers to take those services to the next level."
Serving Teradata's customers
Lewis notes that Teradata is launching a variety of Customer Services related to the new Teradata Warehouse 8.0. "The primary services include an upgrade and adoption bundle that guides the customers through the process of implementing the new release end-to-end, addressing every aspect of the upgrade," he says.
Teradata is also enhancing its Dual Active Solution with additional services. "For customers moving to the Teradata Dual Active Solution, our dual-active services are designed to smooth and enhance the transition from a single-system environment," explains Lewis. "We help customers examine mission-critical data warehouse functions or applications, preparing them to move to two systems in active mode for near real-time data replication."
Current Teradata customers can benefit from Performance and Capacity services that focus on gaining additional horsepower from existing systems.
"We also offer an operational mentoring bundle," Lewis says, which is "an on-site, hands-on mentoring engagement that provides knowledge transfer designed for the customer's specific business, showing them how to apply what they've learned to their specific business rules and needs."
All of the Teradata Customer Services related to Teradata Warehouse 8.0 emphasize planning and future projections. This ensures that the installation and implementation of the new release is viewed as just another step in a continuous process that prepares the customer for future technical enhancements and unexpected shifts in the business environment.
Careful planning
Preparation is central to Teradata Professional Services. According to Higginson, road maps and meticulous planning are more crucial than ever because of the increasing role data warehousing plays in enterprise operations and the increasing complexity of data warehouse-dependent functions.
"The starting point for any consulting engagement is the business processes that the data warehouse supports," Higginson says. "That means taking a careful look at the whole of Teradata Warehouse 8.0's impact on business operations and prioritizing workload based on business process improvement."
He continues, "We work with customers to plan new feature implementation and accommodate mixed workload environments-all designed to implement and leverage both existing and near-term data warehousing goals."
Chief among Teradata Professional Services' responsibilities is educating customers about how to take full advantage of any new release. Consultants guide customers on how to benefit from Teradata Warehouse 8.0's improved performance, including sharing existing application performance insights and providing feature recommendations.
"The new release's enhancements will allow significant performance increases," Higginson says. "How those increases can best be integrated into the business will be analyzed through customer workshops that provide careful assessment of business operation and data warehouse performance."
The entire Professional Services process, which begins well before installation and implementation, is examined continuously and refined to ensure proper capacity planning.
"Capacity planning should be a proactive, rather than a reactive, process," Higginson says. "Our capacity planning consulting shows customers how to do just that." In his opinion, Teradata's Professional Services help to ensure substantial data warehouse ROI.
"The easiest way to increase value," Higginson says, "is to seek expertise from a world-class data warehouse consultancy-to approach the new release as an integrated suite of hard-ware, software and consulting capabilities."
Customer Services and Professional Services provide that expertise. They look at their business the same way that customers approach their own operations-deliberately, thoughtfully and with an eye to the future.
Patric Helmaan is a writer and consultant who has published
both fiction and nonfiction dealing with the challenges of technological
innovation and the acceleration of technological progress. T
© Teradata Magazine-September
2004
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