Brinker International

Dallas-based Brinker International is one of the nation's leading casual dining chains, operating more than 1,300 restaurants including Chili's Grill & Bar, Maggiano's Little Italy, On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina, and Romano's Macaroni Grill. More than a million people dine at a Brinker restaurant each day, which accounts for the corporation's 2006 sales of $4.1 billion and operating income of $327 million.

Brinker began exploring new approaches to Business Intelligence (BI) for its massive enterprise in September 2005. The company sought a stable, scalable platform that could be the core of their data warehouse, could provide more open access support, and had the ability to satisfy ad-hoc query requirements against large volumes of data. Brinker looked at an all-star field of vendors including Microsoft, Oracle and Netezza before selecting Teradata.

According to Kenny Sullivan, Brinker's Director of BI, several factors made Teradata the logical choice. "We run a relatively small IT shop and didn't have a lot of resources to throw at setting up a new system," Sullivan notes. "So one of the things we looked at was ease of maintenance, support and stability of the platform. In this regard, Teradata has proven itself time and again in the retail and food service industries." Another benefit was Teradata's logical data model, which helped Brinker speed up the development cycle.