Teradata

Since the early 1980s, our passion at Teradata Corporation has been to accelerate your business performance by converting information into insights and insights into action. It started when Teradata built the world's first parallel data warehouses and data marts in 1984 for strategic decision makers. As early as 1987, Teradata espoused a single version of the truth as being the best way for a company to integrate data to share across business units. The single version of the truth provides a single view of the business thereby enabling companies to unify, simplify, and improve corporate performance. The primary users of our data warehouses were strategic planners, budget planners, forecasters, and researchers. Sifting through oceans of data, these strategic knowledge workers produced staggering returns on their companies' data warehouse investment.

These strategic data warehouses motivated numerous Teradata innovations, such as scalable interconnects, virtual processors, integrated high availability, server investment protection, and, recently, multi-temperature data management. For 25 years, Teradata state-of-the-art innovations and thought leadership have shaped the data warehouse market and given our customers a foundation for success. As the data warehouse market matures, Teradata innovations are enabling leading edge customers to forge ahead with advanced applications for their data warehouses – making them the new standard by which others are measured.

With strategic knowledge workers already empowered by the data warehouse, the next evolutionary step is to extend the power of the data warehouse to a new community of operational employees, partners, and customers. Now, Teradata can improve corporate effectiveness by adding insights and analytics to every day tasks, thousands of times every day. From the loading dock, to the ATM, to the point of sale, to the sales agent, operational users need help making decisions intelligently and quickly. Today, Teradata customers are delivering insights every minute to frontline users to improve operations. Teradata makes this competitive advantage possible by extending your existing data warehouse with active data warehouse technologies.

An active data warehouse (ADW) is a single view of your business concurrently supporting both strategic knowledge workers and operational front-line users. While an active data warehouse simplifies the IT infrastructure and reduces costs, those are secondary benefits compared to front-line users making smarter decisions thousands of times during the operational day to positively impact revenue and expenses. When strategic users and operational users share the same ADW, the enterprise has achieved active enterprise intelligence. With this single view of the business, companies can align back office strategy with front-line operational execution through consistent metrics, vocabulary, priorities, and insights. With these shared metrics and insights, companies ensure employees and business processes coordinate to achieve customer profitability, higher product margins, supply chain effectiveness, fraud control, lower costs, and many other business priorities. This alignment and acceleration is the goal of today's real-time enterprise.

There are many uses for active enterprise intelligence that an active data warehouse provides (see Figure 2). It still supports the traditional data analysis needs of back office planners and managers. Then, by extending it to front-line users, hundreds of new applications are possible.

• Shipping and receiving workers can monitor daily fill rates and delivery cycle times, changing carrier methods for fast moving products or high priority customers.
• Sales agents, bank tellers, websites, and call center representatives can use every customer-facing event to solve customer problems, improve satisfaction, and propose relevant offers with a high probability of acceptance.
• Manufacturing yield drops caused by revisions or build to order variances can be tracked hour by hour and compared to historical norms, to detect production problems before they cause excess inventory or delay committed orders.
• Banks can detect suspicious wire transfers or securities trades by comparing them to historical patterns and generate regulatory compliance alerts before the transaction is approved.
• Transportation companies can reroute passengers (or containers) when weather or vehicle failures disable a shipping route, balancing passenger priority and margin optimization.
• Sales and procurement can monitor special bid price quotes, to accelerate the approval process, calculate profit margins as each change occurs, and alert managers to profit losing deals.
• eCommerce web sites can monitor consumer response times to compare them to seasonal surges, and, at the same time, dynamically adjust offers to match inventories.
• Fraudulent warranty and in-store product returns can be detected and refused as they are happening – before money is lost.

The list is endless since there are so many opportunities to add insights to front-line operational processes.

Operational business processes have been waiting a long time for daily tasks to be enhanced with decision support services. Consider how many operational decisions are made every minute in your enterprise that are not based on facts or corporate performance goals. There could be literally thousands of them. But, although the knowledge and insights have long been available inside the data warehouse, technology limitations prevented making the insights available to front-line operational users. Front-line users need up-to-the-minute facts, yet most data warehouses are refreshed only once per day. Front-line users need insights delivered in seconds through familiar easy-to-use applications. However, traditional data warehouses are accessed through business intelligence workbenches that produce complex reports. Perhaps, most important, these complex reports often consume all the data warehouse's computing resources, causing the one second operational inquiries to become ten minute inquiries.

Beginning in 2001, Teradata systematically removed technology limitations to allow both strategic and operational intelligence requests to be served from a single data warehouse. Surprisingly, the Teradata solution also allows CIOs to actually do more with less, the classic business imperative. An active data warehouse from Teradata also eliminates the need to duplicate portions of the data warehouse into operational data stores, reducing costs and complexity at the same time.

With active enterprise intelligence, Teradata is introducing a new concept around decisions per minute. Decisions per minute focuses on delivering fast, analytical information to front-line users to support thousands of decisions every day. To support the decisions per minute workload, you need an active data warehouse that manages the mixed workload of large, intensive strategic queries side-by-side with the short, tactical operational queries. In contrast, OLTP systems are aimed at update and inquiry intense tasks, measured in transactions per second. But OLTP systems only make your business faster. Teradata's decisions per minute helps make your business smarter.

Today, Teradata is more than ready to help your front-line workers get insights on demand. An active data warehouse from Teradata is built upon a solid enterprise data warehouse foundation. Building upon this foundation, Teradata can help you transform your existing data warehouse into an active data warehouse by adding some or all of these active extensions:

• Active Access – high-speed inquiries, analysis, or alerts retrieved from the ADW and delivered to operational users, devices, or systems.
• Active Events – operational events that need to be continuously monitored, filtered, and escalated based on business rules.
• Active Load – high frequency data loading throughout the business day to ensure data is fresh enough to support active access and active events.
• Active Enterprise Integration – links the active data warehouse to existing applications, portals, web services, service oriented architectures, and the enterprise service bus.
• Active Workload Management – dynamic management of operational and strategic workloads in the same database, ensuring all workloads complete fast enough to meet business needs.
• Active Availability – increasing the data warehouse availability from business critical to mission critical.

The beauty of this approach is you don't have to adopt all these capabilities at once. With Teradata, you can implement in phases as your needs for more data, more users, and faster access grow. You can let your business needs drive the technology decisions.

That strong foundation is the combination of our relational database products and industry-leading server platforms. The Teradata® Database offers exceptional performance and low support costs, capabilities that are mutually exclusive with other vendors. Exceptional performance comes from continuous investment in the Teradata cost-based optimizer for more than 25 years – ten years longer than our nearest competitor. Teradata's optimizer performance improvements come from hard lessons in solving real customer performance problems for both large and small companies. At the same time, Teradata developers designed in ease of use. Consequently, with Teradata, your staff won't have to perform tedious file management, data reorganizations, or struggle with complex partitioning schemes. Teradata Database does it for you – automatically.

All of this allows you to use normalized designs that can respond to business changes faster and with flexibility. Given executive demands, mergers, and the pace of competition, a powerful optimizer and normalized design is the only sensible CIO survival plan for the long term. Consequently, industry analysts consistently score Teradata as the top rated data warehouse solution for query performance, concurrent queries, administration, data management, and platform suitability. Teradata's flexible, high-performance data warehouse lowers both the risks and total costs of supplying insights to associates across your company.

Strong evidence of Teradata's high-performance data warehouse quality is, of course, our successful customers. Teradata's clients can be seen at the annual Teradata PARTNERS user conference. With more than 2,500 attendees each year, no other data warehousing conference comes close to the size and scope of Teradata PARTNERS. Run by Teradata customers, it is the coolest place to be once a year for successful Teradata clients, consultants, analysts, and vendors.

Activating the Teradata solution foundation requires adding one or more of the following elements: Active Access, Active Events, or Active Loads. Usually, the presence of one of these necessitates one other, so they're often deployed two at a time. When the Teradata solution becomes active, three infrastructure elements need to be increased to varying degrees. These are Active Enterprise Integration, Active Workload Management, and Active Availability.

An active access occurs when a front-line user or operational software application retrieves information from the ADW. The simplest active accesses use fast, tactical queries to retrieve historical, summarized, or current data. Typically, results are delivered at web speed, often just one or two seconds. Occasionally, when the business process needs extensive data analysis, an active access can take a few minutes. But usually, when a customer is talking to a sales agent or call center representative, there are only a few seconds to decide on the right offer or problem resolution. Similarly, a worker in shipping and receiving may only have one or two minutes to select urgent priority packages for loading before the truck leaves. And, of course, the best time to stop fraud is when it happens, not later when a report shows money has been lost. Fast access speed is not optional. Intelligence is not optional.

Fast, tactical queries depend on a number of features built in to Teradata Database, including primary partitioned indexes (PPI), join indexes, IN-List processing, top N row operations, table functions, and reserved AMP worker tasks. Teradata Database's join index helps front-line users retrieve frequently used data without joining tables in real time. They simply grab the precomputed answer quickly. Extending this, Teradata Database's aggregate join indexes provide presummarized, roll-up information, useful for fast, historical comparisons. PPI indexes narrow inquiries down to a subset of a database table, making retrievals faster and avoiding unnecessary server consumption. In-database data mining allows the Teradata Database to score active events quickly inside the database. This is useful for propensity-to-buy cross selling, as well as right time fraud detection. All of these combine to produce fast response times for tactical queries, ensuring frontline users rapidly make informed decisions and take action, instead of waiting on the system.

Active accesses engage capabilities outside the database engine as well. Consequently, Teradata has invested in integration with BAM Dashboards (i.e., TIBCO®, IBM® WebSphere®, MicroStrategy®, Information Builders, Business Objects™, and Cognos®), federated technologies (i.e., BEA® Liquid Data, WebSphere Information Integrator), and portals that can augment the results provided to the front-line user.

Real-time enterprises are event driven, meaning they're capable of responding to opportunities and problems as they happen. Business events can be as simple as receiving a purchase order or as complex as an airplane flight cancellation. Business events can be detected internally within the active data warehouse or externally in production applications. Once detected, events are filtered to select the most important ones for immediate processing. Event filtering and processing can occur inside an application, inside the ADW, or a combination of both. An active event only occurs when event processing begins inside the ADW or when the ADW is used to augment an event alert with context and insights. The typical output of event processing is an alert to a front-line user or an update message to an operational system.

Teradata Database supports active events with parallel database triggers, internal and external stored procedures, and persistent queue tables. Let's look at a complex example of how these interact. As actual airline flight schedules are continuously updated in the ADW, a trigger fires when it detects a flight cancellation for today. The trigger then invokes a Teradata stored procedure that queries the current lists of passengers who were connecting to the cancelled flight. For each connecting flight passenger, the stored procedure inserts a record into the Teradata queue table. Each record in the queue table spawns a Teradata external stored procedure to reroute one passenger. The external stored procedure interacts with application modules to provide new itinerary recommendations quickly, at the best possible cost, weighing the effect on passenger loyalty. The application module then sends alerts to the gate agents where these passengers are arriving, enabling them to offer passengers their best alternative connections. This yields better customer satisfaction because they have a new, alternate connection without gate agents spending time searching for connecting flights. All this is possible with Teradata triggers, stored procedures, and queue tables that are easy to program and link to production applications.

Many Teradata customers also use operational 'control towers' or dashboards to monitor and track business events as they occur throughout the day. Consequently, Teradata products are integrated with popular third-party Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Process Management (BPM) products. These BAM partner products detect events and monitor results via dashboards. Teradata's BPM partners model workflows across applications, detecting anomalies or congestion that need to be handled immediately. A few examples of Teradata BAM and BPM partners include TIBCO, Fair Isaac®, webMethods®, and IBM Web- Sphere. Each of these software partners provides unique capabilities for defining key performance indicators (KPIs), thresholds, and business rules that alert users when an event needs attention.

Teradata enhances complex event processing by determining what is relevant and what to do about it. Merely responding quickly to business events is not enough. Without historical insights and contextual analysis, front-line users cannot consistently make informed decisions that improve corporate performance. This is where an active data warehouse from Teradata excels – by analyzing the situational context (what is happening over time) and supplying the best business decision recommendation (insights and optimum choices) for each active event.

Competition and customer service drive the compression of data latencies on the operational side of most businesses. Recent industry studies show that for many companies to stay competitive, data must be integrated and delivered in less than one hour 60% of the time, and in less than one minute 35% of the time.1 For agile event-driven enterprises, this means combining what is happening (the event) with what has happened (historical context) to support smarter front-line decisions. For example, responding to the arrival of damaged critical supplies, providing in-store personal offers, or rerouting passengers on delayed flights all require current data (the event) plus historical data (context) for decision-making. This drives the need for active loading of data.

For most enterprises, data loads are done each night because most data load utilities lock up the database tables until finished. These locks can freeze front-line user requests, sometimes for hours, waiting for the load to finish. Active load on a Teradata system bypasses these limitations with a collection of products and services that continuously loads data without locking up front-line users. While some Teradata customers need real-time data loading, Teradata experts prescribe fresh enough or right time data loading to control costs while meeting business objectives.

To apply fresh operational data to the data warehouse continuously, Teradata provides several approaches for fresh enough data loading. Foremost is Teradata Parallel Transporter (includes Teradata TPump capabilities), a highly parallel utility that can continuously move streams of data into the ADW with minimal locking. Not only can queries access a table that is also being updated by Teradata Parallel Transporter, but several load jobs can run against the same table at the same time. This gives the IT center numerous options and flexibility to manage workloads. For example, a busy web site sends account update messages to queuing middleware, such as WebSphere MQ, Java Message Service (JMS), or MSMQ. Next, a Teradata Parallel Transporter streaming job reads the message queue and directly updates the ADW. Within seconds, a customer event is stored in the database and available for both operational and strategic decision making. Teradata is the first RDBMS vendor to provide easy-to-use database load utilities to continuously load streaming data. Teradata Parallel Transporter also supports loading of small 'mini-batches' at controlled intervals to load large volumes of data quickly while minimizing database locks. Teradata Replication Services can continuously move data into the ADW. The benefit of active load solutions is that data are fresh enough for front-line user tasks while keeping server and IT costs as low as possible.

Active enterprise integration requires connecting the data warehouse with contemporary applications, workflows, web services, and your company's existing IT architecture via open standards. Typically, ADW deployments use browser-based portals, BAM dashboards, BPM workflows, and service-oriented architecture components. To achieve this integration, Teradata invests heavily in two major areas: fitting into your existing environment and components for accelerating deployments.

Teradata product integrations exploit open, industry standards, such as XML, SOAP, JMS, J2EE, .NET, and others. Teradata products can also be used with web services open standards, such as BPEL, UDDI,WSDL, and WS-Security. With this foundation, Teradata products are integrated and tested with popular business partner products, including:

• Application servers: BEA WebLogic, SAP NetWeaver®Web Application Server, IBM WebSphere, JBoss®.
• Enterprise Service Bus: TIBCO BusinessWorks, BEA Aqualogic™, IBM WebSphere ESB, Microsoft® BizTalk®, webMethods Fabric™.
• Enterprise Information Integration: BEA Liquid Data, IBM WebSphere Information Integrator.

Teradata's robust industry-specific logical data models (LDMs) provide the database design for an ADW. These Teradata LDMs can save companies weeks or months of end-user requirements gathering and complex database design effort. Representing years of hands-on enhancements and testing with vertical industry customers, Teradata LDMs reduce project risks and implementation time dramatically. And, Teradata infuses each LDM with vertical industry best practices and incorporates emerging business requirements, such as regulatory compliance. The result is a high-quality, fully extensible design, even if you choose to start small with just one subject area. Teradata LDMs already have ADW design features built in, such as date-time stamp versioning, that help eliminate the need for a separate ODS. Since Teradata LDMs enable third normal form physical deployments, they support system performance goals while allowing simple star schema views for accessing underlying data. That's essential to helping end users be productive without becoming database experts. More important, Teradata's LDMs are true subject area specific data warehouse designs. When your business changes, your Teradata solution can change, too. This flexibility enables IT organizations to drive major business changes, not be a barrier to change. This is not possible with data marts which typically resist change. That is why Teradata has deployed hundreds of LDMs in industries as diverse as financial services, retail, telecommunications, manufacturing, travel, transportation logistics, and healthcare. Visionary CIOs know the Teradata LDMs are a key foundation to IT agility.

Teradata has taken industry logical data models to the next level of innovation with the exclusive Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse Road Map (EDWr) modeling tool (see Figure 5). The Teradata EDWr graphically links business questions to the underlying data elements in the data model. The Teradata EDWr visually paints a picture of the linkages, dependencies, and overlapping requirements for both line of business and IT staff. The Teradata EDWr lets them visualize the connection between specific business objectives, source data, and KPIs. A few mouse clicks can show what source data are needed and what neighboring business questions can be addressed. The Teradata EDWr model incorporates a repository of more than 50 industry-specific business improvement opportunities, refined by nearly 300 complex business questions defined during numerous Teradata customer deployments. With this, business users and IT staff can quickly determine the IT effort required to deliver specific business questions from the ADW. An EDWr from Teradata helps line of business staff collaborate with IT developers to weigh costs and goals for the best outcome. It enables the two groups to speak the same language and synchronize their expectations. It also helps to plan the next steps in data warehouse development and implementation.

The crux of the ADW is that it enables front-line users and back-office users to share the same data warehouse providing them with a single view of the business. But in the past, this caused response time for the front-line users to be painfully slow. The now obsolete method for handling this was to have separate databases, called Operational Data Stores (ODSs), for each operational group, thus duplicating costs and multiplying complexity. So, a single ADW is enormously preferable. Unfortunately, concurrent workload management has been a weak spot in relational databases for decades. Most IT operations groups have struggled with procedures and tools to control the query from hell that steals the entire server away from other tasks running at the same time. Even a few complex queries can stall the short tactical queries, turning short queries into multi-minute frustrations.

The common response of database vendors has been to offer query police software that queues queries according to their computer resource needs and releases them when resources are available. Unfortunately, the in-flight tasks often fool the query police into releasing queries prematurely. This happens often when in-flight tasks are in a resource usage lull just before starting a large resource-consuming step. The query police are actually responsible for producing classic Los Angeles-style traffic jams because they're helpless to control traffic after tasks are in flight.

Teradata Active System Management tools solve the root cause of this problem. This starts with Teradata Workload Analyzer, which analyzes Teradata Database user logs and system tables to profile actual usage behavior. The easy-to-use reports and graphs describe what is really happening in the system over time. Teradata Workload Analyzer then recommends workload groups and parameters for use with Teradata Dynamic Workload Manager. The parameters allow the Database Administrator (DBA) to establish and refine the work group categories, throttles, and control settings. Queries and data loads can be prioritized by time (hour, day, week, or month), user groups, and type of workload. At run time, Dynamic Workload Manager analyzes each database query before and during execution based on business rules set by the DBA. Like the query police products, Dynamic Workload Manager releases queries when it knows resources are available. But unlike the query police, Dynamic Workload Manager constantly monitors the active tasks in the system, using DBA specified rules, limits, and workload groups, to allocate computer resources to in-flight tasks. By favoring the tactical queries over database loading, for example, the DBA can favor operational user requests yet still keep the data loads running. Using cost thresholds, Dynamic Workload Manager adjusts the priority of executing tasks continuously. This is what makes Dynamic Workload Manager different from simplistic query police tools. If the users go on lunch break, or there is a lull for any reason, Dynamic Workload Manager reallocates resources to get the maximum amount of work done. Runaway queries can be downgraded in priority automatically before front-line user performance suffers. Fast queries stay fast, and big workloads slow down, but don't starve. Best of all, Dynamic Workload Manager performs with very little system monitoring effort. Since most traffic jams are avoided altogether, only serious exceptions require DBA attention.

To complete the process, Teradata Active System Management includes Teradata Manager, an easy-to-use dashboard and trend analysis of real-time and historical workload performance. It provides ad hoc and standard reports on workload trends, such as high use tables, high resource consuming user groups, and workload history. Teradata Manager allows the DBA to easily track workload performance against service level goals to plan ahead and make changes proactively.

The most obvious benefit of active workload management is that system administrators can control response times for operational and strategic users. Another benefit is the deferral of server upgrades, to improve performance, until absolutely necessary. With Teradata Dynamic Workload Manager, you guarantee consistent response times by controlling priorities and categories, not by throwing hardware at the problem. And Teradata Dynamic Workload Manager contributes to the consolidation of data marts and ODSs into a single data warehouse because mixed workloads can share a single database. This reduces complexity, as well as server and license costs. Finally, active workload management is what enables operational intelligence and strategic intelligence work to share a single view of the business in the ADW.

ADWs typically support from hundreds to thousands of front-line users who need the same high availability as transaction systems. Consequently, existing data warehouses must shift from being business critical to mission critical. To achieve this, all Teradata systems provide a tightly interlocked, highly available foundation. Redundant components throughout the server platform are included in the base configuration and are fully utilized during normal operation to maximize system performance. Teradata servers mask failures with dual power supplies, uninterruptible power supplies, dual I/O controllers, heavy duty cycle disk drives, RAID controllers, and the computer node interconnect called Teradata BYNET™. Best of all, Teradata software automatically manages component failover, reducing the risk of human error during the critical recovery process. Furthermore, redundant components can be replaced while the system is running, minimizing the repair's impact on system availability.

Additionally, Teradata's exclusive clique architecture minimizes the impact of complex failure scenarios and provides rapid recovery from a wide class of failures. If any server node in a clique fails, Teradata Database redistributes the workload across the surviving nodes in the clique by migrating software processes to other nodes. However, moving workloads can degrade front-line user response times. When a four-node clique experiences a single node failure, there is only 75% capacity to serve 100% of the work. Response times may degrade as much as 33%. When performance is critical, Teradata customers add a hot standby node per clique to maintain consistent query performance. Large, tightly interlocked cliques plus innovative recovery software features handle the failover smoothly, minimizing human intervention and recovery complexity.

When Teradata customers need the highest levels of mission critical performance, they choose the Teradata Dual Active solution. The dual active system provides business continuity via a remotely placed secondary server. But the secondary server is not an idle insurance policy against disaster. Teradata Query Director continuously directs work requests to both of the Teradata servers based on customer established rules, providing maximum utilization of hardware investments. If a major planned or unplanned outage occurs, dual active monitoring software automatically makes the necessary changes so current work continues, minimizing the risk of human error at a critical time. Best of all, the secondary servers need not be duplicates in size of the primary servers. They can be configured to serve users of only the most mission critical data while the primary server is offline. Since less than 50% of a data warehouse is characterized as life support critical to the enterprise, the potential cost savings over a traditional fully redundant system is enormous.

Teradata Business Continuity Solutions experts can deliver an availability assessment service that maps out the lowest cost configuration plan for meeting enterprise service level goals. This could range from large cliques, hot standby nodes, and fallback, to Teradata Recovery Centers and the Teradata Dual Active Solution. Teradata Professional Services consultants can help you plan backup and recovery, disaster recovery, availability procedures, and development systems.

For enterprises with a Teradata solution in place, the good news is an ADW is within close reach. The next step is to identify an operational process, preferably a small project, that can benefit from tactical insights. It's best to start small and grow so the IT organization can strengthen its mixed workload skills before tackling a large project. Working with line of business users, start by mapping the end-to- end business process showing the before and after processes. Always clearly identify the business value of the project and set measurable goals for the project results. Teradata industry consultants can help your business managers in this step. Then, and only then, should you plan the technology changes needed. At this point, bring in Teradata Professional Services consultants for an architectural review or other services regarding activating your data warehouse.

With a clear project goal, you should be able to determine which active elements are most important to your organization. Figure 6 is a high-level summary of technologies that are frequently deployed with an ADW. The exact combination depends on your goals. The exact combination depends on your goals.

An active data warehouse from Teradata is a tightly interwoven, purpose-built system of products and experts, not a loose federation (see Figure 7). Every component has been developed to enhance every other. Teradata delivers products that are ready to work together – not a bag of parts. A Teradata solution is harmonious, repeatable, and predictable. All components run in parallel, all components support high availability, and all components work together to make administration easier. The servers, storage, and software all behave as one solution, having been repeatedly tested and challenged by discriminating Teradata customers. Teradata Professional Services consultants are the top specialists in the world for providing end-to-end data warehouse expertise. They practice continuously on one solution set, honing their data warehouse skills as a cohesive team. Even Teradata salespeople are trained and certified to identify the business value of an ADW. Why? Because your success defines our success.

Teradata has a single, passionate focus – not ten different agendas. Teradata specialists are focused on driving business value – profit and cost savings – out of every data warehouse they deliver. Our passion has always been to exploit integrated data, converting information into insights and insights into actions. The active data warehouse is what truly provides the single view of your business, aligning operations with strategy.

1 Gartner, Gartner Study on Data Integration Identifies Key Usage Trends, Feb. 2006.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Dan was an application developer and database administrator at California Federal Savings and Loan. He joined Teradata Corporation in 1989, where he was a senior product manager for Teradata parallel database servers and software. Dan joined IBM in 1993, responsible for product planning on the RS/6000 SP parallel server. He later became Strategy and Operations manager for Global Business Intelligence Solutions. During this time, he initiated, staffed, and developed the IBM Teraplex Centers. Dan returned to NCR in 2006, He is currently a Senior Product Marketing Manager with Teradata Corporation.