This article is an interview with Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata. Stephen has both the academic credentials and real-world successes to prove he understands business and large-scale information processing technology. Stephen talks about how business should respond to the ever-growing volume of data. Highlights follow.

On the complications of increased data impinging business - Detailed data is getting more detailed. Gartner predicts a data increase of 30 times by 2012. Economics, technology and competition are forcing the scalability issue. Detail data will become more commonplace, and critical to remain competitive.

On RFID applications that involve real-time analysis - In the shipping industry, for example, individual packages can be tracked and rerouted in transit. Fed Ex currently scans each package a dozen or so times. With RFID, each package scan could number in the hundreds. In addition, bottlenecks can be identified and the problem resolved as part of the operational controls that are inherent with RFID. While RFID hasn't made its way into the low-end, high-volume retail business yet, it will because of economics.

Using data warehousing to stream real-time data in making decisions - Service levels are quickly evolving in terms of performance and how up-to-date the data needs to be in the data warehouse. An "active" data warehouse is the solution, where current and historical data are combined to enable users to make good decisions in the context of the history.