When done right, it pays to integrate. Those words ring true with Cardinal Health, a company that distributes one in every three pharmaceutical products dispensed in the United States. Cardinal's pharmaceutical segment generates $54 billion in sales per year and is growing. Its data was stored in two physically separate data warehouses—one for internal use and another for external use, and they needed to access both simultaneously. However, that was impossible.

Cardinal solved its problem with a new system from Teradata. "We now have eight Teradata servers that act as one," explains Mark MacNaughton, vice president of information technology for Cardinal. Teradata's solution is a fully integrated Business Intelligence (BI) system. It contains hardware and software, and is scalable so as Cardinal grows so will its data warehouse. Currently, Cardinal has 3 terabytes of data with plenty of room for growth.

In addition, Cardinal has already received substantial return on its investment. It's realizing savings through unnecessary costs, increased productivity, reduction in inventory, and processing of four to five million transactions per day. The amount of transactions that were previously processed during one week are now processed in 24 hours.