Operational BI
Business intelligence (BI) aims to provide businesses with improved data for analysis, as well as data that’s reliable, consistent, understandable and easily manipulated. This data should allow companies to answer enterprise-wide queries more quickly and efficiently.

Teradata’s Active Enterprise Intelligence, which is enabled by active data warehousing and powered by an enterprise data warehouse (EDW), helps businesses incorporate BI throughout their organizations and existing architectures.

Active data warehousing provides near real-time information access to broaden the capabilities of the traditional EDW and give it a more timely approach to providing intelligence. With this new information infrastructure in place, companies can build long-term strategic roadmaps while also accomplishing day-to-day goals like serving customers, ensuring product delivery and monitoring supply chain statuses.

Active Enterprise Intelligence—known as operational BI in the market—gives businesses access to company-wide data quickly, providing key decision makers the most timely and complete information available. Built on an EDW, Active Enterprise Intelligence aligns both strategic intelligence and operational intelligence to improve response times, better merge disparate kinds of data and help companies identify strategic trends earlier.

With the right technology in place, Teradata users will be able to build a BI environment that allows them to understand their businesses’ past and present—and better plan for their future.

Infrastructure standardization
Managing information cross functionally, which Gartner terms as enterprise information management (EIM), is critical for enterprise analytics paving the way for service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementations.

Implementing EIM is not without its own requisites: It requires human and technical needs, such as experienced personnel, data stewardship, extract, transform and load (ETL) requirements and the ability for integration.

Teradata’s Real-Time Enterprise Reference Architecture outlines technology from Teradata and partnering companies to integrate data, applications and users company-wide with business services. Its products and services include a blueprint for facilitating EIM and techniques to integrate an active data warehouse into your real-time enterprise.

Teradata Application Platform leverages an SOA environment to minimize application development. The platform uses layers of services—including Application Developer, Business Component Developer, Application Deployer and Applications Maintainer—which plug into any J2EE application server environment to make it easier to create reusable business components and create a simple method for embedding these reusable components into applications within SOA environments.

Strategic approach to information
In a fast-paced, competitive business environment, the left hand needs to be talking to the right hand. Not only that, each needs to view and use its collective information strategically. An EDW from Teradata allows this type of performance, as it provides a single repository of a company’s current and historical data. Using extensible data warehousing technology and services, the EDW enables businesses to analyze business operations, drive better, faster decisions across the entire enterprise and obtain a single, integrated view of the business.

The EDW allows end users to mine, share and use information from every level of the organization. Features in the EDW—such as high-performance parallel database technology and a full suite of data access and management tools—help meet data storage needs and improve the bottom line of an organization’s business.

For example, a customer service representative (CSR) is working with an unhappy customer and needs to repair the relationship. With an EDW, the CSR can access historical data about the customer while making a decision in the customer’s favor using current data. This expanded access allows the CSR to make intelligent and critical decisions to maintain and even enhance customer relationships.

With the EDW, customer service, sales and marketing, finance, vendor and partner relationships and more are enhanced by the data now obtainable at every level of a company. The EDW also lets businesses measure their return on investment (ROI) in terms of operational efficiency and improved business value.

Master data management
Most companies’ master data is contained in several different silos or systems, making analysis difficult and time consuming. Teradata has released two products related to master data management (MDM) to help businesses consolidate company-wide data into a single repository, ensuring quicker and more accurate data usage: Teradata Master Data Management, the common base, and Teradata Product Information Management (PIM), the first vertical solution built on this new platform.

Two areas that especially benefit from these solutions are product information management and customer information integration. Say a company wants to view the profitability of a product across multiple divisions, customers and geographies. These products provide that company with a single view of its product. Without this solution, the company would have to pull data from three or more different systems, consolidate it and organize it.

Both Teradata MDM and Teradata PIM can be tailored to a company’s needs. This individual fit can be used to clean up existing information: relevant data is pulled from multiple databases into one location, duplicate data is deleted and the information is standardized and then republished onto these systems.

Teradata MDM solutions complement existing Teradata technology to reduce the cost of architecture. Depending on the complexity of companies’ MDM solutions, new solutions could be implemented in as little as three to six months.

Consulting on BI and data warehousing
Depending on your consulting needs, Teradata might already have the solution for you through its seven different consulting services, including:

	Business Continuity Solutions. Teradata consultants guide you through making your information accurate and available 24/7.
	Data Warehouse Maturity Consulting Services. Acquire detailed, trustworthy information by properly aligning your data warehousing processes with your business objectives and strategies.
	Multi-Temperature Data Warehousing. Teradata consulting helps devise an individually tailored plan for CIOs who need to store, analyze and protect their businesses’ data by using individual performance and storage requirements as guidelines.
	Oracle to Teradata Warehouse Migration Service. Businesses who know they need to upgrade their online transaction processing (OLTP) database management systems can now be guided through the process by a Teradata consultant.
	Teradata Data Quality Assessment Services. Scalable technology, proven methodology and a staff of skilled consultants ensure your business achieves the necessary level of data quality.
	Teradata Performance and Capacity Services. These services instruct customers on how to work with variables such as mixed workloads, analytic applications and changing business processes to increase system performance, meet service level agreements (SLAs) and maximize capacity of the Teradata environment.
	Teradata Solutions Methodology. Using eight phases (including research, analyze, design, integrate and manage) Teradata puts its experience of implementing the world’s most successful data warehouses to work for you. T

Teradata Magazine-December 2006