Joaquim P. Menezes, web editor for IT World Canada, authors this article from CIO Magazine. He visits with Thomas Tileston of Warner Home Video services about Tileston's old way of forecasting sales and his very successful new way to pinpoint sales trends.

Tileston and Warner have experienced a dramatic change in forecasting fortune. In 2003, average forecasts at the company were off mark by 40%. Suddenly the situation changed. In 2004, smart forecasting helped Warner Home Video sell 68 million DVDs of the three Harry Potter movies and lead the industry with sales of $4.75 billion (according to Video Business magazine).

So how did Tileston and his team do it? By cleverly combining the strengths of two key data mining/data warehousing technologies: Teradata and SAS. "By splitting tasks between Teradata (90%) and SAS (10%) the same new release forecast now takes an hour and 15 minutes" — compared to 36 hours previously. Talk about saving time and money!

For more information on Tileston's savings and the success of Teradata/SAS working together, download the PDF.