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Use of Technology - My thought process on this one is a bit left field I know but… Part2

rita zimmerman — 3/19/2010

An update on my original blog discussing the issue of how to best leverage technology to gain advantage – I was recently in Beijing and went to the market to look for some new badminton rackets to replace my now depleted stock! I wanted to save money as new rackets these days cost around $220-$250 and I needed more than one.

So found some Yonex rackets in one of the markets for only $40 each! and they were the top of the range ones. Looked good!

When I got back home and tried them out, yuck! It felt awful, the strings were a terrible feel. I tried see if changing the strings would to make them a bit better so I got one restrung (another $20). It felt a bit better but still no good really. One of the guys at our club imports badminton equipment so I went to him and he had a look at them – guess what, they were definitely fakes, good ones though! He gave me a pukka one, felt totally different of course, "did what it said on the box".

So while it is up to you to make the most of good technology beware of fakes/look alikes or things that seem cheaper in the short term!

Speaking of best-in-class we are hosting our Teradata Universe event next week, featuring best-in-class business case studies from AT&T, Bank of America, DHL Express, eBay and J D Williams. I will also be on hand to answer any question at the Teradata “Ask the Experts” session.

John Street

The Social Media Evolution is an incredible opportunity: but needs business management’s understanding of why and how!

Ron Swift — 3/19/2010

The recent explosion of the numbers of users on social networks and using social media has proven to the business community that “word-of-mouth” is much stronger than simple brand or product advertising. This has, surprisingly, been true also in the area of product introductions (of high-tech such as the iPhone or specialized media such as TV/Sports). We are approaching the level of direct communications that is similar to the rise of automobiles in the post-World-War II period of industrialization and distribution in the 1950s-1970s.

Interactive applications, social-media, and even company-owned websites will endure more easily than their real-estate-prone predecessors. Banking, insurance, retailing, airlines, auctions, books, media, music, television, sports, and even job hunting have all been transferring quickly to utilize the internet as a major source of new business or a major channel for getting to customers (or networks of customers) through deep and advanced analytics (BI). Connection IS power!

Recently, a blog article by Mark Smith, the CEO of Ventana Research, focused on their view of the massive and permanent changes to our personal and BUSINESS USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA. He is at: (www.twitter.com/marksmithvr ) Mark stated that “Social media collaboration, like any activity related to marketing or interactions in general, is best assessed through measurement. Figuring out how to measure social media interactions and effectiveness has been no easy task for technology providers as measurement is easy only in comparison to the challenge of truly understanding its effective value. It’s not dissimilar from the challenge marketing organizations face in striking the right balance of quality and quantity in the business opportunities (“leads”) they generate…”

Teradata has been working with several advanced analytical and data gathering software firms to bring together and integrate customer and prospect data to ensure a better understanding of actions and reactions. These analytical systems, formally known as Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDW), have now become Active DW’s. What does this mean? They are collecting data, not in batch, but, in minute-by-minute streams and integrating it directly with other customer data.

Why do firms collect, integrate, and analyze data in such fast processes? Well, it seems clear, from many company’s recent successes that providing relevant offers, on a timely basis (sometimes with seconds of the initial data collection and analysis), at the point of contact, with the right product, at the right price, through the right channel….is NO longer a dream.

This is the reality of advanced analytics and integrated data warehousing that is now Active in collection, loading, analyzing, and using near-real-time (NRT) information. Most firms needing such technologies have been latent in gaining their management’s understanding and acceptance of this shift in requirements. Many firms are still using BI and DW as a way of reporting on the past periods. They have not realized that reporting provides only data for viewing (and maybe learning); but active data and new visualizations are providing for operationalizing BI/DW and therefore managing the present and the future.

Yes, you can use analytics to actually predict the future, if you maintain hoards of past historical behaviors, transactions, buying patterns, trends, web page looks, click-throughs, and also textual data that your customer can give you regularly to tell you about them or their needs.

This brings us to think how the future use of Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs), now sold also as iPhones and Nokia special phones, will allow business to drive customers through offers and opportunities. Banks and airlines can benefit from major cost reductions, increased customer take-rates on marketing/sales offers, and avoiding competitive forces stealing their customers.

This will also be true in the mobile telephone business, if those companies realize that one-to-one marketing is essential and that the content may be more important (for revenues) than the communication network connections (meaning the towers and the call fee collections). The world has changed in media and entertainment to provide cable, satellite, and now, PDA watching of major sports and all forms of entertainment. The mobile industry is hastily running hard to figure out what to do. Call prices are going down in many countries, the cost of the network remains the same or is going up (needing new bandwidth for internet connections and streaming of video), and the need for personalized, individualized, selective, and specially prepared offers will make a huge difference in their success or failure --- as a company and as an investment.

Imagine if our automobile manufacturers actual spoke directly with their prospects and truly understood what they desired in an automobile and gave direct input to the design, manufacturing, and pricing. Then an interactive discussion on the merits of the automobile (from a trustworthy knowledge source) to educate the customer. And then to assist them with making the right decision, but not based on pressure-tactics, or sales prices, or even rebates. We all would be much happier.

Using analytics to inform your management about the number of tweets on your site, or even the numbers of people following your “tweets”, becomes almost irrelevant in a changing landscape and world of ideas that is forever dynamic. Active DW, with changeable models and analytics (that learn from themselves) will be the foundation of future predictive analytical visualizations, while also providing for instant recognition of opportunity and the offers to be made. This will take place in the utilities industry (with electronic wireless data collection from meter boxes), in the airline industry (seeing weather changes and people needing to change itineraries), and in other industries where dynamic environments drive people behavior changes.

This will also come true in elections, in countries that have large masses of people on social media networks, and use the systems to communicate news or changes in opinions about candidates or incumbents. Watch the 2010 USA Congressional Elections and see how many incumbents will use ‘social media’ to get to their voters. It will be astounding. This follows the great success of Barrack Obama and The Acorn Group plus the Democrats to truly exploit the social media method as a way of influencing voters. It was a great success. It is only the beginning. And there is little way to stop this movement or evolution. It is like the telephone of one hundred years ago. Eventually everyone will have one, first wired (it took about 80 years) and then wireless (most saturation points were achieved in most countries within 10 to 20 years).

So what can we all do to make this evolution a positive, useful, and a successful business opportunity? The first movement would be to collect immediate web data and integrate it with previous customer data. Second, to analyze this data and use it to sell products, manage services, deliver products faster, get to the market easier, make your marketing costs go down, and increase your revenues. We should jump on any and all examples and see if they fit our opportunity.

Many first initiators of a new technology become the winners. Sometimes the second round improves upon the first round, and you now have that opportunity. Don’t waste your time going through analysis paralysis on whether you need to do this. It will stall your calendar and you will waste more time and money instead of increasing your revenues. Each month or quarter lost, is lost money. Lost profits. Lost customers. And also loss of the future use of the internet/social channel by your firm with those customers. They will go elsewhere and never return!

Mark Smith has suggested (and I agree since these firms are Teradata Alliance Partners) to review recent white papers which help you gain knowledge. See: “Informatica Demonstrates the Value of Data for Every Organization”, and See: “SAP Broadcasts New Enterprise Software and Applications Strategy“, and SAS Institute “SAS Simplifies the Science and Use of Analytics in 2010“ . And as the foundation for advanced analytics and using these above techniques, learn more at “www.Teradata.com and search on “Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI)”

There are three things that you can do.

Do nothing and your competitors will surpass you. “Beware of the Ides of March”.
Use external resources to augment your present staff to advance your abilities to use the Social Media and even your firm’s website to better understand and communicate with your customers.
Be a leader and engage proven vendors or consultants to ensure that you will not be reinventing the past. Let me know what you are doing or not doing.

Personal Note: My father would have been 106 years old today and he would not have believed what we are communicating about in this blog or even how we are doing it! Time is moving quickly!

I’m all ears on this one. Good luck,

Regards, Ron Swift, VP of Cross-Industry Business Solutions for Teradata Corporation

Come Together

Sandra Worley — 3/17/2010

When two companies come together through a merger or acquisition, uncertainty abounds. However, one thing a newly forged organization shouldn’t be unsure of is its data.

That’s why it’s so important to establish a single platform as part of the merger process. Moving toward one data environment should be part of a transition team’s objectives. So says Daniel Fisher, Executive Partner–Accenture Information Management Services, in the latest issue of Teradata Magazine. "The first thing to do is gather data and look through it," Fisher says. "How are you going to integrate your customer records, sales, suppliers and all that transactional data? From an operations perspective, you want to understand the books and where you stand there."

More insights from Fisher, as well as Rob Toguri, Capgemini Global Vice President of Business Intelligence (BI), are available in the feature article "Fruitful combination."

While we’re on the subject of mergers, our piece on Sprint Nextel illustrates best practices for bringing two firms together. With a dedicated Base Marketing Warehouse, the combined telco’s Marketing Department gained a single, cohesive view of its subscribers for more effective subscriber management.

Building a cohesive culture and operation after a merger is a difficult task, but it can be made easier when everyone is on the same page—and platform.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

The Battle of Britain: Thought Leadership in Information Management

rita zimmerman — 3/16/2010

In the London Blitz of 1940, Great Britain was staring down defeat and an imminent German invasion. With cities, industry and dockyards experiencing nightly destruction, Great Britain needed to out-think Germany. They did this through understanding the value of key indicators and command and control; I'll explain how.

The evacuation at Dunkirk and Rommel's advancement in Africa did not bode well for the Commonwealth. The German Luftwaffe were outnumbering and outclassing English Gladiators and Typhoons in the air and the advance into Russia was an inevitable and grand demonstration that Germany was a dominant threat to the free world. Instead of surrender, complete retreat or negotiation, Churchill was decisive in taking the stance that we more commonly and contemporarily hear as "we don't negotiate with terrorists". I am sure that when he made this heavy decision, he got his best and brightest together in a underground bunker in London and would have said something like "right then chaps. What are we going to do about it?"

What they achieved was nothing short of brilliant. Whether by accident or design, they developed 4 maxims for information:

Metadata - The Ministry of Defence was very fastidious about classifying, naming and understanding data. Bletchley Park embarked on breaking the Enigma and other German codes. Today, we might call this the establishment of "a common business language". With code and decode values and their meanings (some of which had contextual change or interpretation) the British created what would be considered a metadata repository to understand the communications data of the Germans and combine it with their own to create insight. These were facilitated by codebooks and early analogue computing devices. They had data about data and they were making the linkages to create insight for action.
Data integration - the study and implementation of radar to give accurate, trusted data on enemy movements enabled mapping and near-to-real time modeling of the Battle of Britain for immediate response. This war-room simulation and true command and control was arguably pivotal in the turning of the tide for Great Britain. Through data integration of radar data, on-the-ground intel and communications, the Ministry of Defence was able to triangulate and create a thorough and trusted situational awareness upon which they could look at the highest risks and mitigate them. The extension and visualisation of this is depicted in the famous film the Battle of Britain where Women's Royal Air Force ladies move models around a map flanked by a score of communicators and officers feeding intelligence, happenings, radar data and commands into the equation (the early version of today’s Geospatial mapping).
Understand What Makes Best-in-class - the British undertook to invest in the best-in-class equipment for where it counted the most. They looked at the immediate risks to them which was fighter escorted bombers annihilating their way of life, followed by a blitzkrieg assault on the ground. How do you mitigate this threat? They needed a superior fighter in numbers that could out-fight the escorts and something agile enough to get in quickly and take down bombers before they can off-load their deadly payload. These aircraft needed to be ready, repaired, maintained and deployed at a moment's notice to patrol areas / patrol during times of risk and respond to confirmed threats. The British would invest a significant part of their war effort on this capability. Enter the Spitfire and the men who flew them, in all their glory. Easy to fly, easy to repair and deadly in the air. Radios in each plane and disciplined communications through a common language was the mechanism they used to feed information back to the war room on how this threat mitigation was performing.

These four maxims of information management; metadata; data integration; and best in class, galvanised the strategy that stopped the Germans from being able to use their superior man-power to march jack-boots up and down Trafalgar Square.

With Churchill and his war cabinet in the war room, they created an environment of near-to-real time information management and situational awareness. This competitive edge was the cornerstone of their role in defending their nation and ultimately playing their alliance role in winning the Second World War.

With war-rooms being replaced by dashboards and sophisticated Data Warehouse, analytics and intelligence technologies, it shows us that the demand and principles are enduring. As time has moved on over 60 years of innovation, the enabling technology used by Teradata means you don't need a cast of thousands manually participating to provide such insights and the greater awareness of having more than just the bare minimum of data, but rather as much information that is of value. Best in class, integrated data and understanding of the data you use for decisions and insights is what Teradata provides to its customers today.

I am still very impressed that the British came up with and augmenting these concepts without the enabling technologies of today, yet it was possible to create such a detailed and decisive situational awareness. For the future of information management and our understanding of it, the Battle of Britain really does show how pioneers evolved some of the information maxims of today; "so much is owed by so many to so few" and I am not just talking about the pilots!

David Bremstaller

Please complete: “There are things known and things unknown and in between …”

David Placke — 3/15/2010

Now, guess what!? Well, if you were to ask a BI expert at the Teradata Universe Conference to complete this sentence, he’d probably say “…a Teradata data warehouse”, and, for an amazing lot of questions, this is a perfect answer. Nonetheless I suppose that if you asked Joschka Fischer, former Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany, who will be one of our keynote speakers in Berlin, he’d answer like a shot: “…there are doors” - and he’d be the winner of the quiz. I believe this is because Fischer, also known as the “godfather” of the German Green Party, was culturally conditioned in the years of the 1968 student movement to which Jim Morrison’s Band “The Doors” delivered the soundtrack.

When asked about the name of the band, Jim Morrison once said: “There are things known and things unknown and in between there are doors”. And, funnily enough, that is why even today many people believe that the Door’s singer authored these poetic words, while in fact he plainly quoted the famous British poet William Blake. Today, it will take you only a few clicks on the internet to check this out, but notably Blake is ranked only Nr. 4 of the Google search results. Jim Morrison gets the top spot with other links suggesting, for example, Aldous Huxley as the author of the quote. How do you know which source you can trust? That may be a routine question for every Google user but it also gets to the core of what data warehousing is all about: trustworthiness and quality of information are key when it comes to decision-making.

And there is another dimension, too: handling complexity. Long before the term “globalization” was coined, international relations experts formed the idea of “interdependence” to grasp the growing complexity of the modern world. Some of them have concluded that we need stronger supranational institutions if we want to have any effective governance at all. One probably wouldn’t deny that such institutions sometimes increase, not decrease the complexity of the political sphere. So how did Fischer handle the decision-making process within these frameworks, trying to influence an opaque and permanently changing outside world, without being able to tell just how reliable the information at his hand is? This makes me curious about his keynote.

Mario Bonardo

Cash-hungry state agencies finding megamillions in revenue by drilling for money with Teradata

Darryl McDonald — 3/16/2010

The Wall Street Journal just ran a story on how states are using specialized tools to drill for and find megamillions. But the story’s not on oil and gas drilling. It’s about state revenue and tax departments who are drilling deep into their infrastructure reservoirs for detailed data – across many rich subterranean sources. They’re becoming masters of tapping into veins of data that they can convert to cash – with Teradata databases and tools. States mentioned in the article are Oklahoma and Ohio, however several others have hit some big revenue geysers. They’re excited about it, and have some very happy finance and information executives.

Not all of the state testimonials made it into the final WSJ article. The State of Texas has been drilling with Teradata for years and has uncovered and collected more than $900 million in unreported and under-reported tax revenue. The State of Missouri began a few years ago and it has collected more than $90 million.

The State of Maryland just joined this group of innovative governments and is now implementing a Teradata enterprise data warehouse system and tools to mine data for tax revenue. All told, our state agencies using Teradata systems to drill data have recovered over $1.3 billion.

We at Teradata have bet our business on the premise that the solution to almost every economic problem that organizations experience can be resolved by using our powerful, real-time analytic database to explore and exploit their own dynamic reservoirs and click streams of detailed data for actionable, money-making information.

We congratulate these resourceful and innovative state agencies for following the lead of many global commercial organizations in finance, telecommunications, and retail that have discovered that drilling into detailed data with Teradata database systems can send 100-foot fountains of profitable revenue up into the air -- and spray it all over their businesses, year after year.

Darryl

Spot success

Sandra Worley — 3/12/2010

Succeeding in business is all about spotting opportunities and capitalizing on them. And as our Q1 issue lays out, geospatial technology is proving to be one of the most promising ways to do just that—find the right location to set up a store, determine the best geographical region to reach with a targeted marketing message, and make a multitude of other business decisions that rely on answering “Where?”

With our latest Dataplay puzzle, “Hot spots,” we invite you to test your ability to spot opportunities. See how quickly you can divide the grid into rectangular sales territories. Each must contain exactly one store, and the number of blocks in the individual territories must be the same as the number marked on the store. Solve the timed puzzle by April 1 to enter a drawing for a GPS homing device.

Also in this issue, read about Shelley Perrior, a database and middleware supervisor for Hudson’s Bay Co., who’s the focus of the Portrait article. Shelley has surely spotted her share of challenges and excitement so far in her career.

Here’s hoping you keep spotting plenty of your own success!

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Don’t let Oscar Fool You—3D Is Here

Colleen Quinn — 3/10/2010

Well, James Cameron didn’t exactly walk away empty-handed from Sunday’s 2010 Academy Awards, winning three Oscars in predominantly technical categories out of nine nominations. But, I’d be willing to bet he expected an even-bigger armful of the trophies, especially considering that Avatar is THE biggest box-office success in the world, ever. While the awards weren’t necessarily forthcoming, I suspect the Academy still recognizes a revolution when it sees one. The true advent 3-D content has arrived—and Avatar has made that very clear in a very big way.

I remember a time, something like three decades ago, when a 3-D experience meant a trip to the local 7-Eleven to buy green and red lenses to watch an Elvira “Movie Macabre” horror special on our home television. The highlight came as the Mistress of the Dark tossed a few handfuls of popcorn at the screen, causing me to squeal in delight. The fact that my parents allowed their young child to watch such garbage is the subject of another discussion.

My how things have changed. It’s been more than three-decades since 3-D made its first forays into our living rooms, but Hollywood and consumers would finally have us believe that the industry ready. Avatar’s HUGE success-- followed quickly on its heels by this weekend’s record-busting 3-D weekend release of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland ($ 116 million, blowing Avatar’s $77 million opener out of the water!), and the imminent releases of How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—is driving large consumer demand for 3-D, both in the theater and in the home.

3-D is driving big change throughout the supply chain. First, there aren’t enough theaters to accommodate the sudden swell of theatrical interest in 3-D, with an estimated 4,000 3-D-ready screens available in the U.S. and Canada by the end of March. (Compare this number to the 7000—screen average across which most wide-release films are released). It doesn’t take an expert to predict that there will be a surge in 3-D deployments by theaters across the country—and, some service providers are moving fast to take advantage (See recent news from Tech on its first 3-D Cinema deployment).

Then, there’s the impact to home theater—as if our latest technology refresh to the flat-panel wasn’t enough, a crush of 3-D televisions are hitting the market. And, while expensive, they aren’t all that much more expensive than a high-quality flat-panel when you consider the discounts manufacturers are offering to seize market-share. For consumers like me who didn’t bite the HD-TV bullet yet, 3-D TV is a viable option. Electronics manufacturers are out in force to storm the market. In fact, Panasonic just announced a partnership with Best Buy to sell something like one-million 3-D plasmas in the next 12 months, and most of those at steep discounts approaching 50%.

But the impact trickles down further. Box-office numbers are bigger. Home theaters need to change. And, advertisers need to consider their response. It’s happening. CBS Outdoor launched its first 3-D Campaign—though, granted it was digital signage. Royal Caribbean is also dipping its toes in the water (no pun intended) with a UK-based theater advertising campaign in 3-D. 3-D advertising will come to the television, too—and agencies and services providers are already preparing for the creative and technical demands which get dragged along.

Then there’s the next shake-up for studio home entertainment organizations. These guys have been rocked about for years with platform changes and introductions. Still reeling from the speedy introduction of multi-platform digital distribution, and the rapid adoption of Blu-ray, Studios have another format on their hands—and most majors are looking to introduce their first 3-D home video products this year.

I’m not much a gambler, so I won’t offer any predictions. I’m curious how this will all shape-up as the year progresses. Until then, I’ll just say this: I always suspected that Elvira was a trail-blazer!

Colleen Quinn

*Image Source: article.wn.com

The explosion of data

David Placke — 3/10/2010

Utility companies are on the verge of having to learn how to drink from a fire hose when it comes to data.

Smart meters are rolling out to a house near you, by 2013 all houses in Victoria will be fitted with a smart meter. So the utility companies are going to move from 4 transactions a year to between 17520 to 35040 transactions per year, depending on the number of channels that the smart meter uses.

There must be quite a few thoughts that are going through the minds of these organizations, but once they get past the fear of so much data, think of the opportunity.

As someone who is fascinated with what data tells us about people, I am looking forward to better understanding of how I as an individual actually use energy. So I thought I would share my hopes around what a utility company will use my data for:

Visibility to how I am using energy though out the day
Visibility into how much I am paying for energy during the day
Comparison between me and other houses in the same area
Comparison between me and an eco friendly house
Hints around how I can reduce my energy bill
Rate plans that drive an eco friendly house

Most of us want to be green, smart meters are an opportunity for Utility companies to work with their customer base to drive down our carbon foot print. And the best bit about all of this for me is, Teradata is the right solution for an explosion in data.

Daniel Tehan

The Surgeon, the Survey and Survival

rita zimmerman — 3/9/2010

Statistical analysis is a venerable approach in medical research. It is one way to find causes of conditions that are not fully understood, for example triggers of incurable diseases like cancer. It can also give you a good idea what determines child mortality rates in a given society at a certain point-in-time. The key determinants may not even be of a medical nature, as Hans Rosling, professor for international health, will point out at the Teradata Universe in Berlin.

Rosling is both a scientist in the medical sphere (he has discovered an unknown disease in Africa and its cure) and a pioneer of data visualization in the health sector. He has worked to turn “static” statistics into dynamic developments that make sense immediately. It is quite amazing what his tool can do – it gives a degree of flexibility that makes it easy to quickly check an idea (provided that you have the data available). The benefit goes beyond application in the health sector – you simply get a better understanding faster. Rosling’s favourite example is how visualized insights can dispel myths about the developing world. But let’s stop here. Rosling is a brilliant presenter so let’s not spoil the show in advance. Please come to Berlin to see for yourself.

Once you’ve seen Rosling, you will start wondering what else data analyses could do for the health sector. At the conference, there will be a whole workshop dedicated to this. Joint customers of Teradata and SAS will explain how they have increased quality and reduced costs (at the same time) employing advanced analytical capabilities. To me, it’s one of the most interesting fields at the moment – it has reached some level of maturity but its potentials are far from being fully explored. I think we will see some real progress in Berlin.

Simon Doherty

Continuously Crossing Channels while Crossing the Continent

Paul Barrett — 3/9/2010

Oscar night and here I am blogging, did you see that Sandra Bullock? Was that couture or was that couture? And that Steve Martin what a hoot, really fake arrow through the head that never gets old. When I was on the red carpet earlier I almost gagged when I saw Joan Rivers …. Oh yeah, data, databases, customers … I got all dressed up for nothing…

Just checking in is a cross channel interaction.

I finally did the iPhone check-in for a flight and it was pretty impressive – no boarding pass, just swiped my phone through security and at the gate and onto the plane. That was pretty cool as I am always wondering where my boarding pass is while I wait for my flight.

The context of this is also interesting. I left Denver on a 4 day, 3 city trip – Chicago, Raleigh, Atlanta and back to Denver. I forgot to online check-in when I left my house so I had to do it at the kiosk. Then I checked in at the office in Chicago for my next flight, but I had to print it because it wouldn’t let me do the iPhone thing for the United Express flight. Then – I did the kiosk thing again in Raleigh because I didn’t have a printer and didn’t know the phone was an option. Lastly leaving Atlanta I was able to do it all from my phone.

So in four days, I used multiple channels for checking into flights as I headed across the country. The iPhone check-in was also interesting because it combined real-time messaging (SMS) with a mobile device for an offline activity – flying on a plane (at least it seemed like a real plane). And all this is happening within minutes – checking in, getting the message and loading the pass on my browser. Plus think of the rich data the airline gets knowing my phone number, browser info, willingness to try / adopt new technologies and my activity towards boarding (hint, I am kind of a last minute type of traveler).

I think this just highlights another of the many use cases for integrating online and offline data.

Speaking of integrating data, Webtrends and Omniture both announced new ways to measure Facebook activities. I know that smarter people than I are looking at the pros and cons of both approaches, I am talking to you Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, John Lovett, etc.

First some background. A couple weeks ago, I was researching web traffic for a presentation to a large maker of refreshing carbonated beverages. But they had very limited web traffic, almost no search spending – but a huge brand. What was going on? They and their agency were primarily marketing through facebook. Just one campaign facebook page had over 500,000 fans.

But from a data standpoint that used to be a dead-end. You could see all the user-ids of fans, but what does that mean? Not much. But from what I understand from Mashable, is that Webtrends allows you to look at custom fans tabs – so you can understand what your fans are doing on the site as they move between tabs and put things on your wall etc. without having a Facebook application – and looks at the referring data so that you can see upstream on visitors – perhaps from Twitter. (screen shots here)

Because I got to present with Webtrends at Teradata’s Southeast user group last week, I was really excited because the audience had lots of great questions about how to use this for cross-channel marketing. Come out to San Francisco on April 1 and Newark in May and get more information from Webtrends yourself when we speak again at the Teradata User Groups.

Paul Barrett

Don’t take our word for it

Sandra Worley — 3/8/2010

At Teradata Magazine, we recognize that Teradata’s best spokespeople don’t work for the company. They’re the customers. That’s why we strive to highlight their successes in every issue—including the Q1 issue.

Starting with "Take 5", NCR Vice President and CIO Bill VanCuren offers his insights into the best way to rejuvenate a data warehouse.

In “Smart call,” we learn how Sprint Nextel integrated marketing data on a single data warehouse platform after the two telcos merged. Not only did the base marketing warehouse enable the company to enhance and increase targeted initiatives, the consolidation effort reduced expenses for maintenance, upgrades and system management.

Likewise, an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) was a key enabler for Freescale Semiconductor as that company undertook a massive re-engineering effort. In “Not just another link,” we discover how the chip maker revamped its supply chain planning system to deliver more accurate data to more users. All reports are generated from the same repository, enabling end-to-end data analysis.

Finally, as part of the cover story, “Pinpoint opportunity,” we examine the US Transportation Command’s (USTRANSCOM) use of technology to integrate location and logistics data in a visual format to coordinate missions. USTRANSCOM is responsible for the worldwide distribution of all personnel and equipment in the Department of Defense via air, land and sea. Real-time data at the fingertips of commanders empowers them to make timely, well-informed decisions to coordinate global operations.

That’s just a sample.

We’re always looking for great customer success stories. If you’d like to share one, drop us a line at teradatamaginfo@mspmag.com. Maybe your organization will be featured in an upcoming edition.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Advancing Corporate Uses of the Internet and Social Networking to Drive Business & Profits

Ron Swift — 3/4/2010

It’s about 65 years since World War II ended and that means major transitions - for many reasons. First, there are a massive number of ‘baby boomers’ who are becoming of age to receive health benefits (mostly through US’s Medicare), and secondly, there will be multiple European Countries that will default on loans, economic debt, and promises to their combined EU leadership. (You heard it here, right?) Third, the leadership of most of the leading industrial countries have been forgetting their functional job responsibilities or purposes and have embroiled themselves in politics (as usual) which is undermining the economies of the great 20th century nations. This century will become, or is becoming, accelerated in actions, based on Business Intelligence, Analytics, and the ability to track customers/prospects like never before. So the old ways are quickly passing.

Maybe these events will not affect the opportunity of all of us to reconsider what we could achieve by “knowing our customers” so much better and driving profitable actions. The world of the internet is taking over the world of “direct selling” and also of “knowing preferences of customers.” Or has it?

Social media, sometimes confused with social networking, has catapulted upon the scene and is driving many businesses to re-evaluate their web-investments and the requirement to integrated web-based information with normal customer/product information in their DW. Social Networking appears to be an excellent way for telecoms, banks and others to ‘see’ their customer’s connections or interactions.

Sherry Heyl informed us about Alan Radding’s interesting and informative recent articles on this subject. Alan has posted a series of articles about the internet itself, one special one on 03/03/2010 which covers social media and social networking. These insightful blogs have informed us that “there even is a social media portal for CFOs, called “CFOzone”, where financial professionals can engage in forums and discussions and participate in various types of professional social networking. But that is focused on the CFO’s professional development. Social media/networking also can do good things for the business itself. “

Alan’s point is to assist us, as I have been trying to do for sometime now, to better define what can and cannot be accomplished in this arena. He goes on to say: “To start, let’s not confuse social media and social networking — both terms are used interchangeably — with e-commerce. With e-commerce, you put up a Web site for the purpose of conducting business, making sales, and generating revenue.

“Social media is not overtly transaction-oriented. Rather, it revolves around content-driven marketing. For example, one large consumer packaged food company, put up a social media Web site. It does all the expected customer service things through the site, includes discussion forums for use by its customers, offers recipes and enables customers to share recipes, and provides ask-the-experts forums on related topics — all content-driven.”

“Social media generally avoid explicit commercial transactions. Instead, you create content with social media to build the business and the brand, everything from recruiting talent to rallying the faithful to countering bad news. (e.g. Toyota leveraging social media to rebuild its brand?)

Alan’s thoughts give us “6 content-driven things that any business can and should do with social media:

Establish presence. With hundreds of millions of active participants, you want continuous visibility among the people who are important to your business, be they customers, prospects. partners, or other stakeholders. (RSS Hint: don’t use this channel to provide nonsensical offers and things customers dislike. Learn from them, use it wisely.)
Build rapport and relationships with specific audiences. Cultivate relationships with your important stakeholder groups through two-way communication. (RSS Hint: Better understand the leaders, followers, and the potential buyers of the future.)
Establish your business as a leader and authority by providing helpful and insightful content that can’t easily be found elsewhere, information people want. (RSS Hint: Stop sending out silly or incorrect marketing/sales messages to your customers. You are killing your brand and the millions you have invested in the brand.)
Engage prospective customers and partners interactively. Invite feedback and input, and be responsive, attentive, empathetic, and supportive. (RSS Hint: Integrate this data and you will enable analytical possibilities that were never before acted upon.)
Listen and learn from your customers, supporters, and all your various stakeholders. Encourage constructive criticism, conduct surveys, solicit suggestions. (RSS Hint: Store these within customer records in your BI system.)
Build brand and company loyalty. Social media is an ideal vehicle to grow whatever loyalty initiatives your organization engages in.” (RSS Hint: Use ETL and web tools to discover and collect data which would help you satisfy customer needs.)

You might also try going to another location to review some great information at these 20 social networking sites for business professionals.”

Now, what does all of this have to do with Data Warehousing or BI? Well, smart companies have been gathering data from the internet, analyzing it carefully, sometimes integrating it with their own customer or prospect data, and making the right offer, at the right time (e.g. timing can be everything in business), through the right (customer desired) channel, at the right price (in a commoditized world), and with ‘personalization’ based on past experiences with the company.

Three suggestions from our customer experiences at Teradata Corporation:

Gather the detailed data from the internet, don’t just review the statistics/volumes/hits, and use the information to learn more about your customers and what they need.
Drive future offers based on customer needs, not just your product manager’s desire to get his products sold to anybody. This will enhance your credibility with your customers and also regain long-term loyalties. (Oh, loyalty also comes in the form of ‘free’ referrals to other customers, which brings high return for your analytical, marketing, sales, and pipeline investments.)
Measure and analyze the positive and negative transactions or lost opportunities. Learn from them and learn from what your customers are saying or doing on the internet through social media or social networking activities.

Using advanced techniques not just advanced tools, to Integrate web Intelligence into your marketing and sales, driven by facts not statistical figures or just hopes, will provide an assuredly greater contribution to your business. Many of our customers have seen this avenue as a way to truly ignite many opportunities, even during an economic downturn, a commoditized environment (or lower prices), wisely using a delivery of excellent, personalized, relevant, timely, and needs-based propositions and services through their data warehouses.

Have you accomplished something new such as this? Let us know. We appreciate your comments and feedback. Thanks for the tips Sheryl and Alan.

Ron Swift

Location Matters

Darryl McDonald — 3/4/2010

I was listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation a few weeks ago and heard a fascinating discussion with Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert, about how companies can successfully navigate crises that threaten their public image (Feb. 4, 2010).

Dezenhall made an excellent point about the position in which organizations find themselves when something goes wrong. He said that the first order of business – and the greatest challenge – is determining how widespread a problem is. Does it affect a single store or an entire region? Is there one unhappy customer or are there hundreds of them? Does the problem affect a single component or an entire product line? And where in the supply chain or manufacturing process did the problem occur?

Without quick, clear answers to these questions, companies have to guess at how best to respond, and sometimes, they guess wrong and never recover. These days, businesses can’t afford to guess; they have to know.

That’s where “location intelligence” comes in. The context of geospatial data, itself, is nothing new, nor is the idea that this data holds tremendous potential. What is new is that business intelligence technology has finally advanced to the point where geographic-oriented data that already exists in organizations can be effectively accessed, analyzed and acted upon.

I believe without a doubt that location intelligence is the answer to the challenge Dezenhall described and to some of the greatest challenges that businesses face today. An organization that actively studies geospatial data in the context of its business interests is well positioned to answer the questions he posed, not just in response to a public crisis but perhaps to prevent the crisis from ever happening in the first place.

Moving forward, I don’t think companies will have the option of choosing whether or not to embark on a location intelligence initiative. Either they will jump in and start seeing results, or they will stand back and watch others pass them by.

Michael Gonzales, managing partner of DSS42 LLC, an industry research company specializing in strategy and architecture, was quoted in the Q1 issue of Teradata Magazine as saying, “If you’re not at least at the start of a spatial perspective in your data warehouse, then you’re behind. In the next two to three years, it will be difficult to remain competitive without some spatial perspective.”

Time—and competitors—wait for no one. So go ahead and check out that article to start exploring how location intelligence can transform your business.

Darryl

Could this be the next big – whoops, it’s already here!

rita zimmerman — 3/3/2010

Spotting trends early-on is the ultimate challenge in marketing. It’s one of the tricks that demand chain management (DCM) solutions can do if they are fed with real-time sales data and leverage powerful analytical capabilities. What makes trend spotting so challenging is the fact that it only makes sense if you manage to do it in a relatively small time frame: the trend must be there but it mustn’t be obvious to everybody yet.

If you want to know what a trend looks like at an early stage, ask Magnus Lindkvist. He identifies trends for a living – in the old-fashioned way, actually walking the high streets and other places, watching people. Click here to see a perfect example from his website. The video demonstrates impressively the various stages in which a trend evolves:

a trend is (usually) started a long time before you can tell whether it will ever become popular
a handful of “first movers” does not automatically mean that there will be a massive breakthrough (albeit it makes it more likely)
once there is a critical mass, the trend is self-sustaining and it attracts more and more attention from bystanders
once people start joining the existent “in-crowd” in larger numbers, it turns into a stampede as nobody wants to miss out

In the video, a successful trend spotter would have to predict the popularity of the dancing at some time between 0:55 and 1:30 (because afterwards, it really is obvious to everybody.) Not so easy, don’t you agree? Well, it’s retailers’ daily business. Economic uncertainty has made consumer demand extremely volatile, which means that retailers need to identify changes quicker than ever to take full advantage of their insights. We are sure that Magnus Lindkvist’s keynote at the Teradata Universe Conference in Berlin will spark some new ideas how to enrich the existing trend analyses in retail as well as in other industries.

Mario Bonardo

Take down wall

Paul Barrett — 3/2/2010

Mr. Marketer – Tear Down this Wall

Paul Barrett — 3/2/2010

Mounting research indicates that consumers are not happy with cross-channel experiences – and its hurting business. In the past I have noted research from Forrester and Gartner. This week I saw this article on stores.org. What I love is that consumers are just like my 4 and 5 year old daughters – they subscribe to twitter to get special deals, but they don’t like the fact that prices differ by channel.

        (special discussion this morning at 6am)
        Me: how do you want your pancakes – whole or cut up? Addy: Cut-up.
        Me: Do you want syrup? Addy: no Syrup.
        Me: do you want Butter? Addy; No, no butter
        Me: here are your pancakes. Addy: I don’t want pancakes, I want a bagel.

I digress, but it is relevant. Consumers don’t necessarily know what they want, but they sure know what they don’t want. They don’t want:

To walk into a store and have the associate not be able to see that they are a VIP customer.
To have more information about their profile, loyalty and purchases on their iPhone than the associate has.
To have to get an MBA to understand the company’s myriad excuses for not sharing information across channels
To go back in time - I got brakes today, with a nationwide warranty – but the stores computers are not connected. Connected computers, what is this the Jetsons?

What’s crazy is that this is a huge opportunity for the company.

Money Left on the Table (1): Fifty-five percent of the time, call centers had at least the same info as the website, but didn’t act on it to up-sell and cross-sell.
Money Left on the Table (2): Ninety-three percent of stores could look up pending orders – Pending orders would seem like a great opportunity for up-selling too! Especially if the customer is asking about a pending order.
Money Left on the Table (3): Thirty-five percent of stores didn’t offer in-store pick-up of online orders, yeah, you wouldn’t want those online customers crowding up your store and buying stuff.
Pushing customers away: Refusing to match or honor online prices in stores. Okay, they are different channels, but really why compete against yourself, it is not like there is nobody else to compete against. (See above, customers don’t want to have to understand internal processes).

So companies are missing opportunities and their customers are disappointed. Not quite a win-win. Now, I have worked in big companies and consulted with many. These issues are never that easy to solve. But this seems like a great opportunity to solve an internal problem and drive sales. It is a classic area where technology can be a profit driving investment.

So what to do. Let’s start with what not to do – don’t boil the ocean. The underlying reasons for these issues are complex. The systems involved are complex – and touching the customer experience can be fraught with issues.

I suggest we start with data and transparency. Freeing the data so that it can be accessed across the company and by consumers is critical. Give data to the associates in stores and on the phone so they can be empowered to help customers and drive sales.

Second, integrate online and offline channels to hide complexity from customers – because customers switch between online and offline in real-time. Legacy systems can be a hindrance. But don’t hesitate on this, the payoffs in sales, loyalty and customer information will vastly outstrip any technology investment.

Finally, Listen. Open the doors to customer feedback, learn from your challenges. Build on customer experiences. If they are willing to share, it is important. Give them a channel to express frustration, transform that frustration into engagement.

There is a great win-win opportunity sitting in front of the marketing world. Breaking down the wall between online and offline is the only way for cross-channel marketers to win. Otherwise they are giving away a competitive advantage to online marketers (You didn’t read that here, I will deny it).

Paul Barrett

Hot off the presses

Sandra Worley — 3/1/2010

The latest issue of Teradata Magazine is online and in the mail this week! In it, we take an extensive look at location intelligence (LI). From business applications to technical implementation, the Q1 issue has it all when it comes to geospatial solutions.

We explore the topic from a business perspective in the cover story, “Pinpoint opportunity.” Being able to answer a business’s “where” questions provides a new dimension of analysis for many organizations. In The View from Here, Teradata Chief Development Officer Scott Gnau astutely draws parallels between businesses’ use of geospatial data to reach their objectives and lab mice searching for cheese in a maze. As he concludes, with LI, “you’ll know exactly where to find your cheese and where it will be tomorrow.”

Transitioning from the benefits of LI to how to make it happen, we discuss the capabilities of Teradata technology in Why Teradata. As authors Arlene Zaima and Ellen Boerger explain, “Companies should make sure the solution they choose offers fast, in-database analysis of integrated traditional EDW and geospatial data.”

Last but not least, Tech2Tech offers some nuts and bolts about geocoding and getting the most out of your geospatial data. Check out Hands On and “Planning a route to location intelligence.”

Top to bottom, this issue maps out a course to geospatial insight.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

InformationWeek’s “10 Most Strategic IT Vendors” Includes Teradata

Darryl McDonald — 3/4/2010

I am a big sports fan, and have watched the Vancouver Olympics Games every chance I get. It energizes me to see the amazing athletes and their families get recognition for their years of practice and dedication.

Now, while no one will confuse me with an Olympic athlete, Teradata can indeed claim some similarities, as we regularly are named in prestigious awards. Our most recent recognition was being named as one of InformationWeek’s “10 Most Strategic IT Vendors.” One of the truly great aspects of this award was being called out for the customer focus that we all work so hard to achieve every day.

“Marquee customers,” wrote Editor-in-Chief Rob Preston, “attribute much of their success to the competitive intelligence they mine through their ‘partnership’ (and that's the word they use most often) with this leading data warehouse and analytics software vendor.”

Our customers are an ever present key element in our success. Gartner cited our relationships with customers in its announcement of the current Data Warehousing Magic Quadrant. Additionally, British journalist Mark Whitehorn captured Teradata’s customer focus in an article he wrote after attending our customer-led user group conference, named PARTNERS. Top Teradata executives, he wrote, “are walking around the conference, talking to their customers. Get on a conference bus to go to the evening's entertainment and Stephen (CTO Brobst) or Mike Koehler (president and CEO) is likely to get on and sit in any spare seat and talk to the customers who happen to be there. My experience is that this is unheard of in a company with revenues of $1.76 billion (2008).These guys probably don't have a mission statement that talks about customer engagement; they do it instead. Is this behavior admirable? I think so, but the laudability isn't really that important. What is important is that the customers love it and, in return, give their loyalty.”

As the Olympics come to a close, the athletes will return to their homes and bask in their achievement. We at Teradata will keep working with our customers for their success. When they win, we win.

Darryl

I Am Erin Brockovich, Hear Me Roar!

Colleen Quinn — 2/25/2010

I love Zappos. Love them. Every pair of shoes I own, almost without exception, has been purchased from Zappos. The same is true with my son’s shoes. Every pair. And, I haven’t always been the easiest Zappos customer. My return rate (thanks to the most liberal return policy on the planet, with free return shipping) is about 50%.

I once bought a pair of boots from Zappos last minute before a winter trip to Finland (brrr), only to discover, under the Northern Lights, the boots were too big. I had to wear them to ensure I returned back to Southern California with my feet intact. And, when I got home, I asked if I could return them—worn and all. After a polite “our policy says the shoes should be unworn,” I was extended a store credit. With free return shipping of the worn merchandise. And, the entire discussion took place over chat!

Soon after that, I was invited to be a Zappos VIP! So excited, I tweeted the good news. Moments later, a tweet came in reply. From @Zappos_service, saying simply “We love you too! Welcome to VIP!”

Talk about a company doing everything right: making my experience easy, being flexible on policy, and being absolutely forward thinking in their use of social media to monitor how consumers are responding to their brand. It was enlightening, and it motivated me to buy another pair of shoes. :-)

So, yesterday when I was in a funk, I tweeted my love and appreciation for Zappos again. I wanted to reward a company for taking care of their customers, because I was embroiled in a dispute with a company who seemed to do just the opposite.

I’ve been engaged in my own personal consumer protection war this week. I’ve been a bit of an Erin Brockovich, and I’m not letting it go. I believe I am a victim of the egregious use of bait-and-switch pricing by one of the US’s leading online travel services companies. And--given the size of the company I’m tangoing with-- if I am, it’s likely you might be too. This is a big company—a more than $1BN company.

Here’s the story—I needed to book an international business trip, more than a month in advance. I am looking for a balance of competitive pricing and decent itinerary. (I’m not the kind of gal who likes to spend 24-hours in an airport for the sake of a few bucks). My own corporate travel options seem limited or even overpriced. So, I decide to be prudent with my company’s money and check the major online travel services for better deals. I check the usual suspects: Travelocity, Expedia, Kayak, etc.

I settle on the one which seems to have the best deals for my dates. The itinerary is good, the deal is smokin’: $800 +/- for a roundtrip fare. And, the offer clearly states there are multiple seats left. I’ll take it. I grab my credit card and click to the next screen. I choose my return itinerary, which doesn’t alter the fare. I’m ready to transact. Then, bam, the screen refreshes. A polite warning message informs me the itinerary has been re-priced. It’s now an unreasonable $2400. How did that happen? A glitch, I assume.

I try again. Same result. I wait a day. The route is still available, the price remains listed at $803. I select the route to transact. Another “price jump.”

“Price Jump” is the CEO’s phrase to describe what is, in my estimation, bait and switch. How do I know this is the CEO’s phrase? Because I emailed him directly. (You can find just about anything online these days). I emailed him after I wasted an hour on the phone the call center who: 1) refused to offer me real names of the attendants to whom I spoke; 2) also refused to provide ticket numbers to monitor our communications; and 3) offered some pathetic excuse that the systems don’t synch rapidly enough. The first two are just terrible customer the service. The third is an outright fib.

I tested my theory multiple times over multiple days—taking screen prints of each price jump. Then, I sent my email. I was impressed to receive a response within six-hours, even signed with the first name of my now BFF of a CEO. I was politely directed to executive resolutions, and a warm apology was offered for the poor customer service. I pressed the issue…. I couldn’t care less about the service. I wanted to know about the money.

At the outset of this incident, before emailing my BFF, I tweeted my experience and anger. No “I love you;” no acknowledgement of the issue. Nothing. I wonder if this company has any idea of their brand’s perception in the marketplace? Or, perhaps they have the luxury of not having to worry, unless the CEO tells them to. I’d worry. When I Googled the name of this company, and the words “bait-and-switch” or even “price change,” I got over a million hits. There are, it seems, lots of disgruntled customers.

And, in an era where the Voice of the Customer can be heard loud and clear, I’d strongly recommend these guys start listening. Some of my favorite companies make a regular habit of monitoring blog posts and tweets for telling comments about their brands and services. Zappos is certainly the most zealous, but we I’m currently followed by a number of companies who care about what I have to say. There are rich tools on the market, combined with powerful analytics, enable companies to make sense of their brand in the marketplace, and better, make proactive business decisions about how to spend ad dollars and align marketing efforts.

I guess my travel company hasn’t learned this yet. The back-and-forth dialog with them was interminable. The only remedy? A voucher for my next trip—as if I will ever consider using this service again! That, and a continuing implausible dismissal of the systemic problem as a “glitch.” Glitch? Not likely. This morning I tested again with different dates, different locations—same price jumping results.

I’m frustrated to say the least. But, I know one thing for sure. When I opened Twitter this morning, I saw my love note from Zappos posted in reply.

“@colleenquinn Aww! Thanks for the love you made me blush! ;-) (Secret= We love you too! But...Shhhh....Don't Wanna Make Everyone Jealous)!”

Now, that’s a company even Erin Brockovich can love.

(Check-out Zappos_Service tweets in response to customer posts at: http://twitter.com/Zappos_Service)

Colleen Quinn

Bound for Berlin, to the Teradata Universe

David Placke — 3/1/2010

We are several weeks into the new year already and optimism is slightly returning to Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The economy is trying to recover around the world. New opportunities arise while business cases for better insight analytics are more compelling than ever.

Currently, we are in the run-up to this year’s Teradata Universe in Berlin. In the coming weeks, we want to give you a taste of what we have been preparing. Among the multitude of sessions, keynotes and presentations that our visitors are accustomed to, there will be a special focus on the automobile industry this year. A joint study by the European Business School and Teradata has clearly shown that supply chain management in the automotive industry could be significantly enhanced with data warehousing – and help carmakers operate more profitably.

What about other industries? Let’s have a look at retail, certainly one of the most competitive of all industries. Mr. Silvester Macho of Metro, one of our long-standing customers in Europe, has agreed to deliver a keynote address in Berlin to tell us what Teradata has done for them in recent months.

For Teradata, web analytics is one of this year’s hottest topics. This is because a) more and more commerce is going online and b) Teradata’s recently introduced Extreme Performance Appliance 4555, using the power of SSD technology, makes real-time analyses of browsing behaviour much easier and more affordable. Together with some of our partners, we have recently been investing a lot of time in this field, and I am sure our debates in Berlin will help to take us and our customers even further.

So let me take this opportunity to invite you to attend the Teradata Universe Conference 2010.

Hermann Wimmer
President, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Teradata Corporation

Healthcare Information Systems Need ADW Therapy!

Darryl McDonald — 2/23/2010

Healthcare information systems everywhere are on the operating table. Some are in intensive care. I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV, but I can tell you without a doubt that the growing pain and pressure in healthcare information systems is best treated by the leader in fast-acting enterprise intelligence – Teradata.

Teradata’s time-tested and proven ADW therapy has helped many businesses recover from IDS (Intelligence Deficit Syndrome) – deadly to companies in hypercompetitive markets. IDS is characterized by episodes of blindness to opportunity, disintegration of processes, inaccurate reporting – and an inability to make fully informed decisions. Okay, most of us know that ADW means Active Data Warehousing – Teradata’s approach to delivering detailed intelligence in real time – to those on the operational front lines who need it most.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I do want to make a serious point. In healthcare today, the need for near-real time analytical intelligence has never been greater. As our elected representatives struggle to modernize healthcare, let this be understood: one sure way to improve the quality, cost and delivery of healthcare is to raise the quality of intelligence used by healthcare providers, planners, payors and product makers. The Teradata approach is all about raising visibility to those users of intelligence – and it is already being done.

Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the US, is completing a Teradata ADW to integrate claims, eligibility, pharmacy, prescription and other medical data from multiple systems into one centralized access point. It is used to integrate and mine clinical data to better understand the causes of disease – and find cures.
Highmark, a Blues health plan, is using its Teradata system to identify and fight health care fraud and abuse in near-real time. They have dramatically improved reporting and trend monitoring and are expanding the system to include proactive health management – creating personal wellness programs.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is building a data platform to maintain a clear line of sight on its operations and transactions – a single, integrated data repository from Teradata. Tracking claims processing records with this platform empowers CMS to detect and thwart fraud, waste and abuse.

We are sure that the ADW approach, extended to other federal healthcare agencies would further improve the quality and cost of healthcare. Integrating data from all government healthcare entities such as HHS, SSA, VA and DoD would accelerate best practices and knowledge discovery. One priority example would be the realization of the VA’s Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record – implementing a Teradata ADW to serve all VA and DoD beneficiaries.

I am not saying that a Teradata system will solve all healthcare problems. But by raising the intelligence of the core systems that feed, manage, analyze and deliver information to millions of healthcare professionals, these experts will have the detailed visibility to collaborate and resolve problems. Someone said “ignorance can be fixed.” Absolutely – with intelligence. As an experienced practitioner in this field, I strongly recommend ADW Therapy.

Darryl

Sign this contract here: its all free...Or is it?

David Placke — 2/24/2010

In previous years, Federal Government agencies have been given riding instructions to get the cheapest, "all you can eat" licensing bundles that provide economies of scale and cheap costs per unit. The world has changed, however. Where once the salesman who asked you if you wanted to buy a watch and get some free steak-knives was a friend, he is now steering you away from success.

The Gershon Review into IT in Australian Federal Government illustrated the need to demonstrate and measure efficiency and effectiveness in IT BAU and projects. Gershon also left the book open for Government to write the next chapter: identify efficiency savings and re-invest 50% into new capability building projects. Important to this process is being able to itemise costs, drill-down into just how many and how much of something is needed or can be reduced and demonstrate just enough to do the job efficiently and effectively. The identified savings are the key to being entrusted with new public monies to build capability. If this is not done, restructures, diminishing funding bases and a dissolved role for branches and divisions will ensue.

In the new wave of transparent Western Democracy, the transparent, lean and mean IT Divisions will be entrusted with public monies to enrich society and provide ROI to the taxpayer. These successful groups will be, more than ever before, reliant on contracts to help them achieve this result.

Returning to the proposition of the "all you can eat” contract, this model most likely cannot achieve Gershon's vision. Buying enterprise infrastructure and software licenses where there are lists of products, services and infrastructure without associated costs will be the biggest impediment to organisations achieving measured savings.

The acid test for an organisation is if they can switch off a server, data mart, license or service to result in real, immediate and measured savings. If an agency cannot do this, their model needs to change to respond to the new environment. Teradata offers a range of services to help organisations realise efficiencies, including a data mart consolidation service. Agencies can work with industry partners like Teradata to find and harvest savings from inefficient and ineffective data management strategies. Again, these services can only help organisations if the product or service being trimmed-down can be measured.

When negotiating large, enterprise agreements, agencies will have to demand granular costs, down to the unit, hour or fixed price for service level. There may be a trade-off in moving from a veiled cost model which suits large vendors and reductions in service levels, licenses and quantities. This, however, is the world of "just what you need", and being able to measure and demonstrate that not "all you can eat".

David Bremstaller

Moments of Truth vs. Customer Journey

Paul Barrett — 2/22/2010

I have been immersed in Powerpoint land lately. One of my favorite quotes is from Vint Cerf, who I worked with in the mid-90’s, “Power Corrupts, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely”

Since powerpoint is the lingua franca of most of the business world all out thoughts need to be reduced either to four 12pt font bullet points, a single picture with a pithy word or some animation that makes kindergarten drawings look like Monet.

My challenge is communicating the power of integrating web data into the data warehouse to drive new marketing performance and ingenuity. In my last post I noted that the customer experience is often found painfully lacking when customers use multiple channels. Over 40% of customers rate cross-channel sales and service interactions as poor or very poor, according the Forrester. (subscription needed).

What I have found is that when we talk about channels, we only see moments of truth – and when we look cross-channel we see a customer journey. A channel has too many blind spots to really provide a good view of the customer journey. Let’s look at an example of a negative customer journey - I’m talking to you Southwest and Kevin Smith.

Its clear that this was a great example of a web-based customer dialogue. A customer complains and the company responds. In front of millions of people – all of it documented in online data. Here are just some of the data points.

Twitter post – Post, Date/time stamp, Sender
Kevin Smith Social Network – (facebook, Twitter, SMODCAST subscribers etc. 1.6 million twitter followers alone)
Geospatial data – geospatial information about the airport
Southwests multi-step CRM outreach – phone, e-mail, letter, tweet
ReTweet traffic

Showing the data is complex enough – but what about the outcome? When we discuss examples like this, we want answers.

Customer is saved + customer lifetime value
Change in overall revenue
Success of PR strategy in mitigating the risks?
Did Southwest have to incur new costs – ie advertising campaign?

In reality the result is mixed and somewhat unknown. Will Kevin Smith fly Southwest again (I am on the edge of my seat waiting to hear, LOL ) . What happened to Southwest’s revenue in the following days / weeks.

This is to some extent the tipping point for the integration of social media and CRM – or Social CRM. But it really is a very limited but at the same time complex example. This is just the data fall out from one customer story.

When we shift from moments of truth to the customer journey we greatly expand the volume of the data, but also the increase value of the data. Because moments of truth don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen within the marketplace. And the marketplace is constantly shifting and changing and made up of (to misquote Carl Sagan) billions and billions of moments of truth. And around each of these moments of truth are little data solar systems made up of data matter from websites, call centers, point of sales, social media. Often you can draw a straight line from a customer complaint to a particular experience. Like we did with the Kevin Smith example.

But when marketers that want to improve the customer experience and reap the benefits of higher revenue from loyalty, higher spending more repeat visits, they need to have a more sophisticated business intelligence strategy. They have to be able to simultaneously grasp the details and impacts of individual moments of truth – and see the bigger picture that puts these moments in context.

Which brings me back to the limitations of powerpoint. When we talk about complex-cross channel issues we have to have a dynamic, fascinating story that reaches out to many perspectives. The challenges is in the complexity of audience. Some people get the big picture and want to know what the steps are to take action, some want to understand how exactly a tweet ends up driving a CRM response, with no time for these . 30,000 foot slides – how do you match a tweet with an email address they want to know. And others don’t want to get caught up in all this technical mumbo jumbo – hide the complexity, make it simple.

So we corrupt the story to the tool. Is it corrupting me – or I it?

Paul Barrett

Getting your head around the clouds and SaaS

Sandra Worley — 2/18/2010

Cloud computing is all the rage in IT and business circles these days. Many industry analysts and publications are touting it as the next big thing in technology. But for some, the concept and implementation options are cloudy at best. What it is? Is it right for my organization? Which approach should I take?

The Q1 issue of Teradata Magazine, which goes live next week, offers answers.

The Insider’s Warehouse article by Dan Graham, who leads Teradata’s Active Data Warehouse Technical Marketing, delivers an outstanding overview of the subject. It explains a view of working definitions and the cloud computing service models types then goes on to compare and contrast public and private clouds. Also included are details on Teradata’s offerings in this area.

Software as a service (SaaS) is another topic making the news. In the feature “Buy or rent,” Hydus Inc. CTO Sharma Anupindi and Director of Delivery Centers Anand Rajaram outlines a process to empirically examine whether a SaaS business intelligence (BI) approach or a more traditional buy-and-build strategy would better meet an organization’s needs. A proper exploration contemplates both affordability and complexity factors.

In the end, cloud computing and SaaS provide compelling options for those willing and able to proactively examine the alternatives. Those that don’t will see opportunity blow right by.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Data Glut? The Answer Is Innovation

Darryl McDonald — 2/15/2010

Data is piling up fast at almost every business, from financial corporations to online shopping sites. Security log files, network events, transaction records. e-mail and more are flooding firms with information.

International Data Corp. reports that the digital universe will hit 1.8 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes) by 2011. That’s a tenfold increase in the next five years. IDC says growth is running at an annual rate of 60 percent. And the cost of data management is significant as pointed out in a recent CIO article by Michael Friedenberg.

What can a company do with it all? You can’t just delete it, because regulations say you have to keep it around. So some companies just store it. Others shovel it from one place to another. But smart companies are leveraging the information with innovative systems and using it to shape their strategy going forward.

At Teradata we’re committed to innovation that’s keeping companies a couple of steps out in front of the data information glut. Teradata 13, our latest data warehouse database, reveals our deep commitment to engineering excellence that provides a powerful system to work with the wide variety of data that are pounding enterprise IT data systems. It takes smarts and performance to navigate these challenges from the large volumes of data hitting us from all directions.

Literally: a new source of data is geographic information from the recent explosion of geographic location data thanks to Web navigation sites like Google Earth and GPS (Global Positioning System) devices embedded in cars, cell phones and portable navigation units. This location data is critical to analyzing business trends and customer activity. And Teradata 13 data warehouse along with other tools in our arsenal helps businesses collect GPS data and make sense of it. After all, what’s the use of having data unless you can make sense of it in a meaningful way that helps grow your business. What is your data information glut challenge? We’d like to hear about it.

Related news: For the 8th time, Teradata is one of the Intelligent Enterprise “Dozen”, the most influential vendors for the intelligent enterprise. Teradata is cited for innovation, leadership and in-depth understanding of “what customers need to do to take full advantage of information”. See the full story at http://bit.ly/a0jJKF

Darryl

Get to the point

David Placke — 2/15/2010

I’m not particularly a fan of Tennis but I’m originally from Scotland so took a keen interest in the recent Australian Open and cheered for fellow Scot, Andy Murray.

I’ve come to realise in recent years how in Australia we have an increasing tendency to drag out awards ceremonies for major sporting events. I really felt for Andy Murray in particular as he stood (im)patiently waiting to receive his runners up award and was then asked to make a speech when clearly all he wanted was to get out of there.

It made me think of how time poor everyone seems nowadays, particularly at work and how I imagine people sitting in business presentations, particularly the presentation of analytic findings, just wanting the presenter to get on with it.

I’m currently attending a course on dashboard design and information presentation principals, “Show me the numbers” by Stephen Few and one of the key principals we keep coming back to is how information should be easy to comprehend, the presentation of it should be intuitive and easy to understand ‘at a glance’. Stephen referred to Paul Grice and the Gricean Maxims of which I particularly liked the Maxim of manner, point 3: Be brief.

Stephen showed a video of Hans Rosling presenting at TED in 2006 (the 2010 show is on now where he enthusiastically presents what is essentially an animated bubble scatterplot chart (pretty complex) to debunk the view of the developed world as long life, small family and the developing world as short life, large family. Watch the presentation from approx 3.30 for 1.5 mins and at that point you’ll hear him claim “we have a completely new world”. Quite a claim, but after 1.5 mins you are convinced. That’s getting on with it! It’s how he tells the story.

When presenting or demonstrating I’m also a fan of Peter Cohans mantra to “do the last thing first”. Not only are we time poor, but we are programmed to forget, as Peter pointed out in a recent blog. Quite simply people remember the first and last things they are shown.

When presenting game changing or contentious hypotheses, as many of our customers do, its very easy to feel the need to show all the intricate details of the model they developed along the way (weren’t we always told “show your work” in maths class?). By the time they get to the punch line, if they get there at all, the audience has been lost or the meeting has been hijacked and no action will come out of it.

Make the point and make it easy. It’s an extension of the “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them” idea but gets straight to the point.

“Show me the numbers” does not trivialize extensive research. Analysts should resist the need to justify themselves and their skills with a pre-punch line thesis. Getting straight to the point will invite engaged conversation and a stronger buy in of a hypothesis or at the very least a robust discussion and testing of the model.

The very fact that the analyst has created a robust and well researched model will come out in the ensuing discussion giving ample time to “show the working’ but this time to an engaged and interested audience. Of course you probably needed and used good data, great sophisticated processing and modeling engines and that’s where Teradata comes in!

I would love to hear or see examples of complex information being presented quickly, succinctly and the impact or result it had.

Alec Gardner
Area Presales Manager
www.linkedin.com/in/alecgardner

Customer Satisfaction Analytics Without Data Borders

Paul Barrett — 2/11/2010

“The key to customer retention is customer satisfaction.” – Phillip Kotler

I was reading the most recent Forrester review of customer satisfaction (subscription needed) . And I was thinking about just how hard it is to understand customer satisfaction the way we as marketers look at it today. The customer is typically so far from the discussion that we measure everything but satisfaction.

Our satisfaction measurement and management capabilities are all focused around machines that are not connected across experience touch-points and research that happens with varying degrees of immediacy and context.

	Online	Call Center	Store or Branch
What do we manage	Page Load Times	Average Speed of Answer Average Hold Time	Associate activities
How do we measure	Weblogs Post-visit surveys 3rd Party Tools ACD reports	ACD reports Quality Assurance (1% sampling) Net Promoter Score 3rd party Tools	Mystery shopping Surveys Research 3rd Party Tools
Where is the customer	*Using all of these at different times and sometimes the same time.*

But what does this have to do with Data Integration? Interestingly a separate Forrester report showed that Improved Customer Satisfaction was the leading reason for driving web and offline data integration. In What’s Your Web Data Integration Strategy? (subscription) by John Lovett – 52% of respondents answered the question “In which of the following areas have you obtained positives results from analyzing your company data via and integrated solution?” with Customer Satisfaction.

In today’s multi-channel world with myriads of choices, thousands of daily messages and incredible access to information customer expectations are higher than ever. And with competition, personalization and improved channel performance, they will keep going up.

Let’s look at shopping cart abandonment. According to Paypal some of the biggest drivers of abandoned shopping carts have to do with offline processes – 22% want customer support, but couldn’t find it; 26% want to shop offline and 46% are concerned about delivery costs (Comscore 2009). Other reasons in other survey’s point to out of stock issues or even delivery options. These are reasons for lost sales that all cross the border between bricks and clicks.

And as customers choose many channels our current methods of divining customer satisfaction based in channel technologies and tied to specific channel interactions we are losing the customers perspective. Too many companies still look at 1st call resolution as a key call center metric – but most calls today are preceded by multiple self-service attempts online and on IVR’s. So usually the first “call” is a 3rd or fourth touch of the same problem. Even a perfect resolution may not give that agent a good score on satisfaction if the website or IVR were difficult to work with.

New more holistic approaches are needed, but without turning upside down the channel performance metrics. Satisfaction has to looked at beyond channel performance – but channel optimization is still critical to delivering a good customer experience.

Data can be a key part of the answer – maybe even the answer for some situations. Is your Promoter Score dropping – look at integrated data for root cause analysis. Are your talk times long because customers are complaining about your website to your agents – look for data to pinpoint problems in self help systems – and pass information on to agents to speed calls and improve satisfaction. Is there a breakdown between conversion and activation or usage – look at the data links between the website and fulfillment systems.

Teradata principle consultant Bob Bender did incredible work for one client by linking call records from IVR’s, Agents and Transfers to create a single interaction record across the call center - the client could see the entire customer experience in one set of data. Very cool stuff.

Customers are demanding Customer Satisfaction Sans Frontiers. Companies need to breakdown these silos that act like Iron Curtains between online and offline to really understand, manage and measure the customer experience. (BTW, you can donate to Doctors without Borders here)

And Now a Brief Aside WebTrends Engage Conference (Note to self, get Super Bowl related comments published before the game is over – Go Saints!)

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” William Burroughs, “Howl”

NOLA, IGNITE and (Webtrends) ENGAGE… In the Big Easy it was like Mardi Gras and the Superbowl all rolled into one… Okay, that is next week but it was still pretty exciting in New Orleans this week. Local’s are just wishing it was Sunday, with the Saints in the Superbowl no one can think about anything else… (spoiler alert the Saints won)

Some of the best analytical minds of the generation descended into New Orleans for one of the most fascinating conference formats I have had a chance to experience. By placing Ignite on center stage on Topics from Branding to Guilt Free Crime to iPhone Philanthropy, the conference focused in on the core principles behind the idea. And I think the format really works for analytics and transforming analytics from pretty charts and graphs to action and automation.

But what was really impressive, was the increase in interest in integrating web data in to the enterprise analytics environment. That has really taken off and customer seem very excited about the possibilities.

One a additional aside: I had dinner at Dick and Jenny’s in Uptown where they contributed 10% to relief efforts in Haiti. Even in the midst of the Saints craziness, just four years removed from Katrina, karma and compassion for others – cool.

Paul Barrett

Confusion as a value proposition!?

Rick Loconto — 2/11/2010

I’ve worked in business and IT a long time. Long ago IT terms were fairly well comprehended and tended to be unambiguous. Today however many IT and consulting organizations strive to add value to their offerings and freely inject, albeit perhaps innocently, ambiguous terms.

For example for reasons best known to marketers the term, Real – Time or is that Realtime?, or Real Time?, which plainly means “When things respond to events as they occur” to anyone who has been in IT and worked on Telecom, Banking or Airline operational systems or network systems - has been high jacked to mean maybe within 15 minutes…

This means that actually, when someone that gets what Real-time is, hears the 15 minute definition, the lights go out. Credibility shot down in flames!

I’d say that what the 15 minute definition should be described as Right Time. Taking a business event and applying business rules and enabling an action, is a good thing. Normally doing so in the right amount of time is all that is needed.

The same applies to another often confused term Operational Data Store (ODS). According to Bill Inmon, the originator of the concept, an ODS is "a subject-oriented, integrated, volatile, current-valued, detailed-only collection of data in support of an organization's need for up-to-the-second, operational, integrated, collective information."

Many database vendors and solutions providers have managed to obfuscate the meaning of an ODS into “something that is cheaper and faster than a Data warehouse, thus eliminating the need”. If only that were true!

My take is that in fact that, the functions of a properly defined ODS, and a properly capable data warehouse are merging into one. ODS’s exist because years ago it took too long to load the data into a data warehouse and make the data available – usually overnight. Today that is not the case and many leading Banks and Telco’s actually have true mixed capability systems, ODS and EDW. The key of course is having the tools and knowledge to build a system that has proper workload management, such that the system can perform the expected tasks within a planned time window. And of course with the appropriate IT disciplines, backups, no single point of failure, availability SLA’s, etc.

I am an advocate of keeping things simple and plain. If your IT vendor is blurring the meanings of words and using confusion as a differentiation, you may be in for interesting times! Don’t even start me on Cloud computing!

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Tony Whale

A platform for data warehouse platforms

Rick Loconto — 2/11/2010

The expanding impact and proliferation of data warehouse platforms can’t be overstated. From small to mid-size organizations looking for a data solution that will grow with them to well-established conglomerates searching for lightning-fast analytic capabilities, there seems to be a platform for everyone’s specific needs.

Regardless of a company’s size, selecting the right platform requires exploring several factors, as William McKnight, president at McKnight Consulting Group, explains in the current issue of Teradata Magazine. "Organizations need to choose a proven, scalable platform not just for initial, known requirements but for future, yet-to-be-determined demands as data, users and applications emerge," McKnight writes in his Enterprise View article, “Start small and think large." The thought-leadership piece goes on to explain the many factors that a company should consider when contemplating a data warehouse platform.

Speaking of platforms, the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family is expanding its storage capabilities with the introduction of the industry’s first solid state drive (SSD)-based data warehouse appliance. The benefits of SSDs, as well as other advantages of the platform family, are the topic of an article in the Q1 issue of Teradata Magazine, due out later this month.

As Teradata continues to innovate, we’ll provide a different kind of platform for readers to learn more about cutting-edge developments.

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Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Social Media Marketers Should Get Ahead of the Curve

Rick Loconto — 2/11/2010

Recently I was reviewing an interesting article by Ross Mayfield who is an advisor to www.Slideshar.com and co-founder of Socialtext. He is also at @ross on Twitter. My compliments to him and his team. He has this to say:

As Chief Marketing Officers develop their social media marketing strategy for 2010, they are demanding business results. In 2009, 89% of CMOs tracked social media’s impact by using standard metrics such as site traffic, pageviews, and number of fans (as discussed in a recent survey). However, CMOs expect that in 2010 top metrics will track more closely to P&L business goals––not just Web-related goals. The study forecasts the growth of adoption of the top three metrics in 2010, as follows:

A 333% increase in tracking revenue
A 174% increase in tracking conversion
A 150% increase in tracking average order value

Such a shift in measurement expectation is significant. CMOs indicate a 300% year-over-year increase in 2010 in the number of companies that plan to measure social media’s impact on conversion and a 400% increase in the number of companies that will track social media’s direct impact on revenues.

The 2009 financial crisis probably did social media some good. Not that you need a ton of budget, but competing for scarce budget alongside more traditional projects is a creative constraint. As social media marketing matures, it will become a facet of marketing overall and it will be harder to spot a campaign that isn’t social. Part of that maturing is - you can’t manage what you can’t measure. Part of it driving activity that drives traditional metrics, like how you can drive conversions with LeadShare.

Social media marketers should get ahead of this curve. If you know you will eventually be accountable for traditional metrics, start iterating as soon as you can to find models that work. And volunteer to report these metrics before they are volunteered to you. This will require that you actively engage other parts of the marketing organization and give them stakeholdership in your outcomes. Take a look at your 2010 campaigns, reconsider your metrics, and incrementally realign your activities with the core of the marketing function.

My thoughts:

Social Media is bringing marketing and service people new opportunities of understanding their customers and also tracking/trapping events and customer needs. This is in addition to formerly understanding customers and their behaviors through the use of advanced data warehousing and Business Intelligence investments aimed at processes and techniques that (demand and) drive smart marketers actions. Teradata has been providing such solutions for over 20 years. But now the new era of faster communications, WEB 2.0 applications, and customer-driven interactions has catapulted many countries and companies into a totally new era.
Original Web Analytics are normally collected from logs or applications on websites which focus on their sales activities and orders (and even revenues). But most companies have invested millions or ten of millions of dollars (or your local currency equivalent) and rarely are tracking and trapping the customers entering point, movements on your website, pages read (and how long), products reviewed and subsequent searches/views which define what customers seeks and would desire. If you had a sales-person on their shoulder watching them go through your website, wouldn’t he first be asking questions and second finding ways to fulfill the customer (purchasing or service) needs?
Investing in web analytics has now moved beyond the most obvious metrics (usually self-aimed at the business, not about the customers). The new age of tracking and understanding customers has enabled the opportunity of compiling data into a Teradata Data Warehouse and then using sophisticated analytical techniques and models to do what is necessary to take immediate actions and complete the sales or service cycle. In addition, Teradata has partnered with numerous companies, serving many industries, which extrapolate and move the web activity data to the Teradata Data Warehouse, then other companies provide applications and analytics that give INSIGHT to managers and executives who need information to manage their resources. This new area is known as “Interactive Web Intelligence” or “Integrated Web Intelligence” (IWI). This means integrating web data with your detailed customer data from all of your other channels. This is now (sort of) mandatory; if you plan to be successful in the electronic (PDA) world.
There are some excellent Teradata software alliance partners that provide modern-enabling tools for such gathering and analysis. They are WebTrends and SpeedTrap, along with others who provide additional infrastructure support and loading of data into the Teradata DW’s.

SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATION
Reporting at the end of the month, or even the end of the week, is no longer sensible or even useful. Latent “Post-Action” tracking and reporting, with delays in analyzing and then acting, provide little economic value. In today’s world, using the enabling technologies and smart people to go with them, you should be seeking an ACTIVE Data Warehouse with ACTIVE Enterprise Intelligence. Your competitors are in the integration mode and now gathering web data, and then moving quickly to learn and use such data to manage customer retention, customer sales, customer services and customer satisfaction. Are you?

My best recommendation is to consider how much you plan, or have, invested in your customer marketing and/or web site. Then evaluate what it would mean if you took just ten percent (10%) and reallocated it to Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI). No one, including your customers and competitors, will find your reallocation to be less than magnificent in terms of ROI. BI and DW along with IWI are part of the new world of Web 2.0 and subsequently understanding your customers and prospects. Address them with your best RELEVANT messaging and you will win in the world of intelligence and revenues. What do you need to know? Let me know…

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Ron Swift

www.teradata.com/ronswift

When does a hard science become a team sport?

Rick Loconto — 2/11/2010

The newest report from analyst firm Gartner just came out – and we’re all excited! It’s called the “Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems.” Gartner issues it about once a year, and it positions database vendors based on vision and execution. I am pleased to share that Teradata is in the top spot of the Leaders’ Quadrant. To see our press release and get details, click here.

The report is a serious one because CIO’s everywhere will read it, see the quadrants and how they are populated – then make more informed decisions. Those decisions shape our future business. I read the report’s fine print, too.

Like always, the report focuses on the relevant capabilities of vendors. However, the analysts remarked this year that Teradata’s customers play a role in our product development. I’m glad they did, because it’s an important factor. I commented on it in the press release because I believe that much of the credit for our success as a business comes from our enthusiastic and engaged customers.

We all know that data warehousing is a sophisticated computer science. However, the excitement, enthusiasm and ongoing involvement of our customers (a big differentiator for Teradata) resemble a team sport. Our customers, our employees and our partners talk about data warehousing – the way a lot of us talk about sports.

These high-energy conversations take place at our conferences, in our meeting rooms and in our online forums. And when we hear things like “Teradata is a central player in a high-stakes IT arena,” I think of the Super Bowl. I can’t help it.

Of course, data warehousing is hard science, but for the Teradata community, using enterprise-class intelligence to do dramatic things for a business is serious fun. We talk about big plays, close calls, the best players and every dimension of the game.

And when the Gartner data warehouse reports come out every year, I am glad to see they are keeping score ... and reporting the team standings. I’m proud that Teradata has been in the Leaders Quadrant since 1999, a position we all work together to keep.

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Darryl

Freescalin’ at the Gartner BI Summit

Rick Loconto — 2/11/2010

This week finds me at the Gartner BI Summit in London on Monday and Tuesday; in Helsinki on Wednesday and Thursday morning - and then back in a forecast cold, grey London on Thursday afternoon and Friday. Memo-to-self: next January, go and see some of Teradata’s Mediterranean customers!

Joking aside, attending the Gartner BI Summit is always a great way to start the New Year; aside from the wit-and-wisdom of the assembled Gartner analysts it represents a great opportunity to network with 800+ delegates from a variety of diverse organizations across the region and to get their feedback and perspective on where the industry is headed.

And Teradata had much to celebrate at the event this year: there was welcome confirmation that we continue to lead the industry with the publication of the new Data Warehouse DBMS magic quadrant; our effervescent CTO, Stephen Brobst, and his co-presenter Bobby Ghoshal (Freescale Semiconductor) presented a brilliant case study; and last-but-not-least there was the selection of a Teradata customer - Komerční Bank - as the winner of the Gartner BI Excellence award, with another Teradata customer - JD Williams - as runner-up.

Phew! Not bad for two days work… So long as my boss doesn’t expect this level of achievement for the rest of the year…

One of the “hot” topics gaining attention at the moment and that also featured at the Gartner event is Web Analytics and the use of Social Network data for sentiment analysis. Possibly coincidentally, this was also the subject of a special report in this week’s edition of The Economist.

“Traditional” web analytics – counting sessions and click-through rates - has typically been the preserve of the IT department and has often had more to do with capacity planning than with improving customer experience. All of which is changing, and changing fast.

Integrated web analytics is about regarding the web as just another channel - capturing and integrating the data from the organization’s web-site with the rest of the organization’s data. If that sounds obvious, then that’s probably because it should have been that way all along. But it still isn’t routine practice in very many organizations, with the web data locked in “data jail” in weblogs that can be accessed only by a select few.

All of which means that there are an awful lot of e-tailers out there making some really bad decisions. For example, at Teradata’s recent EMEA kick-off meeting, one of the Teradata Account Directors that has been working with an online retailer provided some fascinating insights.

The organization in question had started down this road to reduce the number of baskets abandoned on its online shopping channel. The logic went something like this: if we can understand why customers are abandoning baskets before checkout, well then we can incentivize them not to do so with a promotion or an additional discount.

Except that when the organization started identifying online shoppers uniquely and analyzing this data on Teradata, they realized that the abandonment rate was far lower than they had thought. Many of the “abandoned” baskets weren’t actually abandoned at all – purchase of the very same item was just being deferred until later.

Even more interestingly, when the e-tailer brought this data into the full production data warehouse (running on Teradata, naturally) and integrated it with the existing customer and transaction data, they found that another huge chunk of these “abandoned” baskets were actually being fulfilled via the call centre. If the organization had gone with its original hunch of throwing money at customers in the form of additional discounts as soon as it appeared that they weren’t going to complete a particular online transaction, they would actually have been giving away margin to consumers who were always planning to come back and purchase, quite likely via a channel – the call centre - with a far higher cost-to-serve. Many of these consumers didn’t need a financial incentive to complete their purchases; they just needed help and encouragement to use the organization’s web-site. It’s (yet another) great example of the multiplicative value of bringing data from across the enterprise together in one place.

Use of Internet data and Social Networking data for sentiment analysis is even more exciting. As those of you who have seen Stephen’s Active Customer Management presentation or read this week’s Economist will know, recommendations from friends – positive and negative - are incredibly powerful in influencing our buying decisions, which makes understanding them very, very valuable indeed. Harvesting data from the Internet and the Blogosphere in this way represents the bleeding edge of modern BI; but in our globalized economy, today’s bleeding edge is often tomorrow’s widely-adopted best practice. And as I blogged here last year, Apple, for example, already knows exactly which features customers want added to its products – and how much they are prepared to pay for these enhancements.

Know this, Apple’s Analytical Wizards: I want an iPad - but I don’t know that I need one. And I do know that my wife says I can’t afford one!

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Martin Willcox
Director of Product & Solutions Marketing (EMEA)
Teradata Corporation

The First Flinch…Amazon gives in just a little bit

Rick Loconto — 2/11/2010

I’ve raced road bikes on and off for more than 10-years. I am one of the tactically dumbest riders I know. It’s always been a short-coming when I’m out-there, and so I’ve spent many races having to rely on brute strength to place, while my team-mates use their brains more than their legs. But, as thick as I can be, I have managed to learn a couple of lessons well.

The first? Self-banter psychs-out the competition. I spend a lot of time in any race chatting happily (but loudly) to myself about my faux-fear of tight turns (the girls get out of the way fast, and voila, I’m through). I also find a lot of time to comment on tougher sections of the race, and how much I just love them. I’m sure to chirpily inquire the same of the girls nearby, knowing full well how demoralizing it is to hear, when you’re sucking wind.

The second? No matter how badly you hurt, NEVER look back. Looking over your shoulder in a bike race is the pugilist’s equivalent to a flinch. You look back, and she’s got you. You’re done. It may take her a few seconds, minutes, or even tens-of-minutes to devour you, but she will. Because she knows your weak, tired and scared.

Well, less than two weeks after an announcement that threw the publishing industry into a tizzy, Amazon has flinched. You may recall my last blog post showcasing Amazon’s e-publishing royalty terms. Amazon seemed to have leveled the playing field and eliminated the agent/publisher middle-man by promising authors who publish their e-books directly through Amazon for Kindle 70% of the e-book royalties.

In a highly public back-tracking, Amazon accepted publishing house Macmillan’s e-book pricing proposal—allowing Macmillan, one of the six largest publishing houses in the US, to publish their books ranging from $12.99 to $14.99. Amazon had demanded $9.99. Amazon’s concession came after first removing the “buy” link to Macmillan’s catalog. As part of the deal, Macmillan will keep 30% commission on sales.

Scarily, for Amazon, the terms are identical to those under which five of the six top publishing houses—including Macmillan—sold rights to their respective catalogs to Apple iPad. So, Amazon can anticipate, I bet, four more calls from emboldened publishing executives who have a great card to play.

But, first, let me back up: it’s been a scary week for Amazon for several reasons. Yes, the Macmillan deal represents a costly and symbolic concession. But, couple that with the widely anticipated, although somewhat anti-climactic release of Apple’s worst-named product ever, and you have a business on the run.

I stand by my earlier blog-post, though. I think Amazon and Kindle are on to something. For all of my Apple brand-love, I don’t think that the iPad (snicker) will replace the need for a dedicated (and, affordable) reader. I think the market can bear the iPad and the Kindle. But, I’m wondering if Amazon believes the same.

Their concession to Macmillan, and my prediction of dominoes to follow, is the business equivalent of a flinch or quick glance over the shoulder. An agile competitor takes careful note and prepares to move in for the kill. Perhaps it’s time for Amazon to start trash-talking—that always worked well for me!

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Colleen Quinn

*Image Source:Seattle PI Blogs

The Fear

Jamie Flynn — 2/2/2010

So on the weekend I encountered the fear, that gut wrenching feeling you have when you are truly out of your depth, the lack of experience, the lack of knowledge, and an inability to know what I should do. Fortunately in Australia you can always call 000 (911 in America, 999 in the UK and 112 in Europe).

My daughter, two years old, had a temperature that spiked to 44.6 degrees Celsius and started to have a fit while in bed. Fortunately we were able to have the 000 operator talk me through my first aid basics, by which time the Ambulance had turned up. The next 5 hours were spent at Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH) while her temperature returned to normal.

So apparently this, febrile convulsions, happens to a group of children, they do not know what causes it or what gets you into the group, they know that it does not cause any long term effects as long as it does not last for long. In short my little girl is OK.

This fear is something that management teams around the world have to live with day in day out, in fact they have become so a tuned to it that they have built “the unknown” into their risk plans and rules of thumb that they run their businesses on every day.

The recent financial crisis has shown us just how devastating “the unknown” can be, leaving our management teams wondering how they can minimize the unknown. Risk Management in many organisations is evolving, and a detailed enterprise view is the vision with associated mitigation plans where possible.

Working at Teradata I have been involved in building solutions to manage the complexities of this vision, enabling management to spend time on determining the mitigation plans. Its very satisfying to feel you’re helping to prepare and lessen the impact of any potential future disasters. What is your organisation doing to mitigate the risk?

I do not believe that the fear will ever go away for management teams or for parents, but a little knowledge certainly makes coping easier.

P.S. A big thank you to the team at RCH

Daniel Tehan

Accelerating “Contribution to your Business” Through DWI and BI

Ron Swift — 2/8/2010

As we begin this new year, it becomes paramount that we discuss a few of the key issues on business management‘s priority list. This is important because, from year-to-year, and quarter-to-quarter, management is continually seeking the answer to difficult questions about increased efficiency and effectiveness, lower costs, increased revenues and profits, or just understanding your ‘contribution to the business’. Maybe this last item encompasses the previous questions and also provides you a special opportunity to convert your work and ideas into real actionable intelligence that drives the business (not just reports on the happenings of the past periods). This is the new key success factor or KPI (as some of management seem-to/want-to monitor).

Business Intelligence, Customer Experience Management and CRM, plus managing inventories and capital resources are clearly on the top of management’s priority list. How do you contribute to these areas and what uses of Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) bring major benefits to your organization? This is not to address limited uses in selected departments, but the promulgation and successful usage of the productive results of these information system management resources.

This brings to mind numerous examples of success, in many industries, that have been achieved by our customers utilizing Teradata’s vast selection of solutions to acquire, consolidate, integrate, access, visualize, and utilize data (or better yet information or knowledge) into the decision-processes of many firms.

WHERE CAN I DISCUSS MUCH MORE ABOUT THIS APPROACH?
AT&T, Bank of America, Banque Populaire, Carrefour, Cisco, DHL Express, eBay, Lufthansa, Nokia, SFR, SwissCom, Telefonica will all discuss their journey to success in using the Teradata DW Solutions at a management conference in Berlin on April 11-14, 2010. These and many other Teradata customers will discuss their processes, the results, and the changes achieved in their businesses. This conference known as “The Enterprise Intelligence Summit” can be understood better by clicking through to www.TeradataEMEA.com.

What might you do, even if you cannot attend such a conference of successful winners?
Well, it might include reviewing what your team accomplishes in understanding customer attrition, churn management, offer preparation and delivery, event-based marketing, metrics regarding essential activities (or common dissatisfaction areas of customers), and constant intelligence gathering and distribution to people who can act upon the recently gained insight to drive actions which involve your customers (and their retention, satisfaction, experiences, or needs analysis).

SOME ADDITIONAL SUCCESSFUL APPROACHES
Secondly, it might be more important to look at the high expenditures for marketing, sales, support, distribution, inventories, capital asset usage, and the like, to ensure that BI Analytics are not just reporting on their past metrics; but now driving with ACTIVE Enterprise Intelligence (meaning cross-organizational knowledge) to achieve quick payback and better decision making.

Third, think of all of the decisions that are being made in your company during the time that you are reading this article. It could be hundreds or thousands that are affecting your customers, channels, competitors, or even partners. What percentage of these thousands of decisions, that affect these revenue-producing resources, actually are the SAME questions and decisions that were made last year, last month, or even last week? Think about loans, credit, payments, resource usage, personnel management and allocations, food or resource distributions, acquiring perishables, or even shipping items to your stores, planes, branches, customers, or partners. If 80% of these decisions could be made online (NRT), using integrated detail data within a cross-organizational view of your customers or channels, then you have an opportunity to reduce waste and redundancy and make a major contribution to the productivity and effectiveness of your business. This is called providing a ‘rules based’ BI system online to the customers or to the decision-makers, which substitutes or enhances the process and reduces major costs.

For the remaining portion of the decisions that could not be made by the DW or BI processes, then a human would have to do more research, make contacts or acquire additional knowledge, and then proceed with the ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ decisions.

SUMMARY and RECOMMENDATION
So, what are you doing that is creative and contributing to your company? We’d like to hear more about it and tell your story and make you more ‘famous’ or just give you a pat on the back. Isn’t it worth it for your upper management to know that you are contributing in ways that they probably have desired for years, but maybe haven’t been able to witness or make happen without a strong and vibrant BI/DW solution? Let’s accelerate them from Theory to Reality to Profitability based on your BI/DW efforts.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Ron Swift
www.teradata.com/RONSWIFT

Geospatial data delivers unexpected benefits

Sandra Worley — 2/1/2010

We are seeing the end of an era. The age-old argument about asking for directions—played out between lost couples everywhere—is fading into history. The advent of Global Positioning System (GPS) technology in our cars and on our mobile phones makes asking for directions completely unnecessary, which may save some relationships in the process.

Pondering the surprising applications and benefits of geospatial technologies is something gaining traction in many industries. Accordingly, Teradata Magazine will focus on location intelligence (LI) in our Q1 issue, which goes live later this month.

In the cover story, we explore how leading organizations are incorporating information about location and geography in their enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) to support business intelligence (BI) in innovative ways.

Digging deeper, the Tech2Tech section examines how Teradata 13 can integrate location data into the EDW for improved analytics. In addition, we delve into the geocoding process, which converts postal addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates. These coordinates provide the geospatial data in a format that can be analyzed to deliver LI.

So stay tuned for our upcoming issue as we continue to deliver the latest on geospatial technology as well as other emerging trends in data.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Back to Las Vegas.

Paul Barrett — 1/28/2010

I had a great opportunity to attend Microstrategy World this week in Las Vegas.

Microstrategy and Teradata put on a great session “Teradata: Real Questions, Real Answers, Real Fast” with Roman Coba, CIO of McCain Foods. It was one of the most engaging presentations I have seen with the audience asking a large number of incredibly insightful questions. But more importantly he was able to highlight how Teradata and Microstrategy go hand-in-hand to deliver new insight to end-users. As a marketing person I know that the technology stuff can get dense and a little a boring, but it all adds up to a big impact for users when it is done right.

Also at the conference, we had a chance to demonstrate some of the joint dashboards we have worked up with Microstrategy for analyzing online + offline data together. We showed off three dashboards, one for Advertising, One for Retail and another for multi-channel marketers. Lots of power and performance and ideas – many thanks to Wolf and Doug.

I also had a chance to attend the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative User Generated Content conference in December. This was a fascinating couple days of incredible thought leadership and the research to back it up. If you are a data geek and want to see some sensational data modeling in action check out the presentations. There were lots of highlights, but on presentation that you gives you insight and shows where analysis of online data and offline activity is going was done on Movie box offices and social media content. I don’t want to be a spoiler, but it is cool how these guys drill down into the blog data and find valuable, predictive information in user generated content that can transform how businesses use online data. You can read more about it here.

Who owns the clickstream? Great Video from telecom TV here. But I think they might owe Jim Sterne some royalties. Download our whitepaper and watch the video. You Make the Call!

Who Dat? Next week we are off to New Orleans for the Webtrends Engage conference. I hope some of you can attend, there will be great online+offline analytics being discussed with some of the smartest people in the business. Can’t wait.

Also, if you can’t make it to New Orleans I will be presenting on IWI in St. louis, San Francisco, Atlanta and Newark at the upcoming Teradata User Group Meetings. Sign-up Now. Plus special guest, Christian Howse from Webtrends all the way from London will be speaking at most of those as well.

I took the picture at the start of this blog with my iPhone using Pano to stitch together 4 pictures. It is one of my favorite iphone apps today – along with the flashlight. By the way go to Teradata.com and check out the IWI demo, podcasts, and 4 great articles in Teradata magazine… Let me know which is your favorite.

Paul Barrett

Digital magazine provides an alternative reading experience

Sandra Worley — 1/27/2010

At Teradata Magazine, we have been watching digital magazine technology mature for the past few years. Feeling the technology had reached a point where it was reader-friendly and ready for primetime, last year we launched a digital version of the magazine. The digital edition is produced in addition to the print publication , which can also be accessed on our Web site.

If you haven’t seen the digital version of the magazine, check it out. It mirrors the look and feel of the print magazine but offers the ability to click on links in articles, zoom in and out, share content at the click of a button, search the magazine, download the magazine, view archives, and print select pages or all pages of an issue.

Digital magazines are popular for a number of reasons. They can provide a cost-effective way to distribute the magazine internationally, reaching audiences previously unattainable because of printing and postage costs. Other readers prefer a digital option because it is a more eco-friendly alternative. Still others want the ability to electronically archive magazines.

Additionally from a publisher’s perspective, digital magazines also offer the advantage of trackability. Interest in digital magazine content can be measured. For instance, statistics track how long readers are engaged with the digital edition, as well as which articles readers were most interested in, etc. This data can be used to help drive the direction of future editorial content.

We hope you will take a look at the digital version of Teradata Magazine. Let us know what you think or what we can do to improve your reading experience.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Enterprise Agility: It’s What We Do. It’s Who We are.

Darryl McDonald — 1/27/2010

Today, I thought I’d just share an update on Teradata, and no, that is NOT me in the image...just wishful thinking! I’m going to focus on what we do for customers, which is, after all, who we are.

We help customers achieve enterprise agility. They can move, maneuver, go up or over or around barriers – or break through. An agile organization is one that can quickly gather intelligence, can creatively and nimbly act or react, can take advantage of changing conditions and can move with strength or power. So when you think of Teradata, think intelligent, powerful, breakthrough … agility.

Today’s environment has businesses rethinking the importance of agility.

For example, the Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a global study last year about how businesses can survive and thrive in turbulent times. Nearly 90% of executives surveyed believe that organizational agility is critical for business success.
According to MIT, agile organizations increase their revenue 37% faster than non-agile organizations. And, they generate 30% higher profits from the revenue they pull in.

Some companies like to fit in, to follow, to avoid rocking the boat. They’re content to stay with legacy systems from our competitors that help them fit in. Teradata customers like to break out. They’re smart. They are often leaders in their industries or breakthrough innovators in their use of technology – or both.

We listen to our customers, learn from our customers and provide value – and agility – to our customers. It’s what we do. It’s who we are.

Darryl

Amazon e-Publishing: To everything, turn, turn…

Colleen Quinn — 1/25/2010

I never understood the reason why “turn, turn, turn” interrupted one of the most poignant lyrical (and, hey, if we’re honest, biblical) lines of all times. “To everything, there is a season…”

Well, despite its efforts to reinvigorate, reinvent, reestablish itself as a viable business, traditional book publishing may have seen its season close this week with a business-upending announcement from Amazon. Amazon is creating a meaningful self-publishing option for authors, allowing them to cut-out the middleman agents and publishers.

The terms are incredible. Authors who publish their e-books directly through Amazon, for use on Amazon’s proprietary reader called Kindle, will receive 70% of the e-book royalties sold through Amazon. 70%! That’s 10-times the current average royalty payment of 6%-8% of the retail cover price. (Stephen King, excepted, of course). Now, Amazon’s terms are stringent. Amazon dictates a narrow and affordable range for e-book pricing—between $2.99 and $9.99. While not demanding e-book exclusivity, Amazon mandates price parity if you sell through other e-reader channels. Amazon is imposing control on the physical book price as well: e-book pricing must be at least 20% below the lowest physical list price for the physical book.

Amazon’s primary goal: to force significant price differentiation between e-books and their physical counterparts, while also ensuring Kindle’s dominance in the e-reader space. Truly, the price of delivery for an e-book is approaching zero. The bits are incremental in cost. For the typical author, the promise of being able to access direct publishing through Amazon, without necessity of agent or publisher, democratizes publishing. For the super-star author, the promise of increased volume and additional revenue means more money in his pocket. Traditional publishers will face even more pressure to demonstrate value to those super-stars.

The Kindle has threatened to disrupt the publishing industry since its massively successful introduction in November 2007. The readers sold-out in 5 ½ hours, and additional supply wasn’t available for another five months. Talk about creating a splash! And, the success wasn’t just marketing buzz. By the end of 2009, experts estimate that more than 1.5 MM devices have been sold. A more important barometer? This Christmas, the sale of Amazon e-books overtook its physical print sales for the first time.

The devices, though, are tres cher, retailing between $259 and $489. Amazon must offer a wide breadth of titles at competitive prices to compensate for the initial investment. And, this new model aims to do just that.

But Amazon isn’t without competition—the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this month highlighted a field of sophisticated e-readers, all gaming for a chunk of Amazon’s market share. One of the real threats to Amazon and other proprietary e-reader devices is the introduction and gaining popularity of the tablet computer. Apple and Microsoft have both launched their tablets to much fanfare (and, an apparently dull Keynote from Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, at CES). With the availability of e-reader software independent of the hardware device—and some of that software available for free—there might still be a shoot-out looming among e-readers and their supporting platforms.

Still, that shoot-out doesn’t seem to have many positive implications for traditional publishing. But, here’s a ray of hope, perhaps. I, personally, can’t imagine cuddling-up with an e-reader in front of the fireplace, or “turning” its digital pages while reading with my kid. There’s something about an e-reader in the bath that sounds both dangerous and expensive. And, an e-reader doesn’t boast to my friends how literate I am when they come to my house, and peruse my bookshelf. But, I’ve made these noises before. I SWORE in 1999, I would never buy clothing online; I now proudly boast VIP status at Zappos. It’s never too late. For everything, there is a season…right?

Colleen Quinn

*Image Source:scrapetv.com

Disasters by Damage Control or Risk Management?

David Placke — 1/29/2010

Watching the news grabs and reading about the Haiti disaster highlights to me the vast, tragic human cost of such disasters and leaves me asking the question what could have been done better?

The importance of preparing, planning and acting to minimise the human cost of such events is important, however it does cost resources. In a country like Haiti, the economic situation would suggest disaster planning and risk mitigation for disaster events are a low priority as compared to simply finding enough food, water, shelter, medicine and infrastructure to keep its people sustained.

However, Western nations with stronger financial positions appear to see disaster planning as a pastime rather than a passion. Numerous catastrophes post 9/11 would suggest that the power to pre-empt and act prior to events or mitigate disasters before they reach their full potential would seem to be inadequate. Could we have managed better in disasters such as the Canberra Bushfires in 2003, the infamous Asia Pacific Tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Cyclone Larry in 2006, Californian Wildfires in 2007, and Black Saturday fires in 2009?

So what comprises the concept or event that is a disaster and what precipitates it? It’s all about understanding risks that form the disaster and taking actions to mitigate these risks through strong leadership and command and control. Without insight into what comprises the disaster and being able to measure it, they can only occur with little or fragmented mitigation. Continuity Central describes "...disaster recovery and business continuity as a holistic approach is changing...from business continuity planning being an option to being mandatory."

In the project context, tasks form activities, activities form projects and projects form programs or campaigns. Disasters are also systemic; the likelihood of all of the "moving parts" occurring in the critical path to make the disaster happen. Like projects, disasters have milestones that indicate their progress and trigger other risks in a sequence that form the disaster. These are the indicators and measures that enable organisations and individuals to track if a potential disaster is now more likely, mitigated or no longer possible. This may sound simple, however it is understanding and measuring causes at the micro level and understanding the broader effect on a macro scale.

When an event occurs it is generally because no-one could see it coming or the risks were apparent could not be seen as a sum of the parts to form the disaster concept. Once it has happened it would seem that responding without a plan is even worse than the former. You need relevant data to inform actions that matter. Without clear command and control of a situation, business continuity and disaster recovery can only occur with good luck. The disaster itself is a series of things, risks that have achieved a milestone that conglomerate with other risks to complete the devastation. If the risks that form the basis of the event are identified and understood, action can be taken to mitigate or remove the next sequence of risks on the critical path. Again, you need to know what is important, have near-to-real-time access to this information and have a model that provides a decision-support basis for accountable and empowered people to act.

The Hurricane Katrina disaster exemplifies this point. It was impossible for the US Government to stop Hurricane Katrina itself, however, the response could have been more decisive by understanding what would continue to unfold without a final evacuation. On the human side, which is most important, the inalienable human rights to water, food, air, care, hygiene and shelter are the basis for all action. While responses were made to these basic needs, they were mitigations rather than resolutions. They prolonged the goal of a relocation of those affected, leaving them in the heart of New Orleans and the disaster area. Timely acquisition of buses to evacuate the remaining citizens in New Orleans was the intent. This simply did not happen.

The San Francisco Chronicle quotes former FEMA head Michael Brown as saying "It was beyond the capacity of the state and local governments, and it was beyond the capacity of FEMA," To me, this highlights flaws in planning through to taking action, including Brown's admission that he "should have demanded the military sooner" to assist in the response as the authorities in charge were responsible but not in control of the situation..

Instead of as decisive response, actions were taken to cordon-off the city and extend the time people were camped out in the stadium and convention centre - where the human side of the disaster unfolded further. Violence and looting ensued as desperation took hold and the disaster became complete. This was a damage control response, acting on what did happen without understanding exactly what created the situation and what was needed to resolve it.

The City of New Orleans needed a plan in the event of multiple disasters including a Hurricane. Early warning systems that provide off-shore data on Hurricane-like conditions, the city's topography and its high risk of flooding, the number of civilians in potential flood zones at various elevations to work out the magnitude of disaster scenarios could have helped model and understand what needs to be planned and what needs to happen if a disaster event occurs.

Disasters are not just about governments and nations nor are they only about natural disasters. In the wake of 9/11 or Katrina, many organisations were challenged by disaster recovery resulting from a terrorist attack. Those without such preparations and insight suffered massive financial loss and, in some cases ceased to exist. Had they had the right information at the right time to act before and after to find the best path to recovery, they may have continued in profitable business. I would argue that in disaster there is opportunity. The retailer, service provider or bank that resumes service quickest will be most profitable in meeting immediate demand and may have a long-term advantage and trust with customers, being there when they are needed the most.

I would like to hear from organisations that are looking at disaster planning, business continuity planning, disaster recovery and discuss the capabilities needed to do this effectively. While we hope disaster never comes, we have to plan that if it does, we will then have the right information and plans to know what happened, what needs to happen and act.

David Bremstaller

The customer is always right

Sandra Worley — 1/19/2010

We’re all familiar with the axiom that the customer is always right. In writing about Teradata’s customers, however, this takes on a new meaning. They’re right about many things when it comes to implementing and getting the most out of their Teradata solutions. That’s why we strive to feature as many of their stories in the magazine as possible. In the current issue of Teradata Magazine, we feature several customers who were gracious enough to share their stories and expertise with our readers.

In Take 5, Ruby Tuesday CTO Nick Ibrahim offers some lessons learned to get the most out of business metrics. First on his list of recommendations is to “Invest in the right infrastructure.”

Additionally, mobilkom austria, Xcel Energy and Charming Shoppes are highlighted in the current issue:

In Ask the Experts, we learn how mobilkom austria optimized the multi-value compression approach from Teradata to avoid the purchase of additional hardware.
In Teradata@Work, utility company Xcel Energy describes how it gained rapid return on investment (ROI) through integrated data.
Clothing retailer Charming Shoppes leveraged its technology vision and relationship with Teradata to expand and upgrade its data warehouse to meet shifting needs.

In the end, we learn a lot from Teradata customers as they leverage data to improve visibility, conquer complexity and ignite innovation. More often than not, they offer the right perspective.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

The Life Saved By a Database May Be Your Own! Dot-Connecting Is Serious Business

Darryl McDonald — 1/19/2010

By now, we’re all aware of the Detroit bombing attempt and President Obama’s comment that US security organizations need to “connect the dots” of intelligence. We at Teradata couldn’t agree more. “Dot-connecting” data integration technology has been around for years, and there is no bigger advocate than Teradata. We’ve been helping companies integrate and centralize valuable data assets for more accurate, complete and timely intelligence. It’s one reason why Teradata is so successful: nobody does it better.

In any conversation about integrating data from many different databases – and moving multiple riptide streams of complex data in real time, Teradata is trump. Here’s why:

Every day, our customers use Teradata databases to integrate data and extend their visibility: to see more of their organizational world, and see it faster.
With Teradata systems, companies serve customers better, detect fraud faster, and track materials across broad supply chains. Companies integrate data to form a comprehensive understanding of their business, their environment and their customers. They collect, integrate and interpret activity across their multiple operational systems, from hundreds of data sources including the global Web. They seek and find patterns, spot affinities, identify shifts in shopping behavior, and learn fast which insights are more relevant than others and deserve priority. The resulting knowledge is distributed to those who can use the insight and take quick, positive action.

The technology – the systems – used in the commercial sector can handle the size that government would need. Teradata already has customers with data environments that are multiple petabytes in size and many customers with dynamic data warehouses that manage a hundred terabytes or more. These systems support not only simple questions, but also reveal relevant trends through the most complex of queries.

Take just one of our large customers as an example. Today, this leading ebusiness processes 50 petabytes of information each day while adding 40 terabytes of data each day as millions buy and sell items across 50,000 categories. Over 5,000 business users and analysts turn over a terabyte of data every eight seconds – and then use this information to make intelligent business decisions.

To put that in perspective: A petabyte holds 1,024 times as much data as a terabyte. Ten terabytes is the equivalent of the entire U.S. Library of Congress. If every PC had a 50-gigabyte hard drive, storing a petabyte would take 20,000 PCs.

We’re the Swiss army knife of data management. To illustrate the enormous processing power required of Teradata systems, note that in some cases, Teradata customer data warehouses manage:

Database tables with up to one hundred billion rows of data
Daily data loads of over 3 billion records
Capture of 30 million customer transactions a day
1.5 million personalized consumer web offers per day
A million database queries an hour
10,000 concurrent data warehouse users per day
Operational query response times of 40-50 milliseconds

Finally, just as we say to commercial sector customers, there needs to be a culture change. You’ve got to decide to share your data for best total advantage. Knowledge is power, yet peak power is derived from collective knowledge. Terrorism has taught us that ‘connecting the dots’ is serious business. Integrating, analyzing, socializing ideas and hunches, collaborating, and ultimately growing our visibility – these are tactics for fighting tomorrow’s asymmetrical threats, whether from a competitor or an enemy.

Here’s a message for Washington’s intelligence community: Change your culture. Start cooperating. Share information. Integrate data. You know the technology exists. You’ve known it all along. We’re here. Let’s get together and do it. The lives we save may be our own.

Darryl

Understanding Personal Motivation

rita zimmerman — 1/14/2010

All sales organisations try and address problems, or solve pain points and that’s routine. However, sometimes in the heavily prescribed selling activity do we forget to make sure we understand what the one thing is that could motivate the customer to deal with us?

I once worked with a sales person who could never get the customer to consider a system that helped reduce ‘Churn’ (customers defecting elsewhere). When I spoke with the customer I asked one simple question. “What do you get rewarded for in your job” – they replied, “Acquiring customers and that’s all!” … hmmm so the motivation this person had was purely getting new customers in the door, his bonus depended on that! Selling him a system that helped stem the flow of customers to the competitor – he could care less about!

Another example was a call centre manager. No way was she buying anything we were trying to sell, she had no issues and no pain!… Eventually she said “Look, I get paid on number of calls handled, not the quality or the accuracy of information we can supply to the customer!”

My dogs, I assume love me, but the truth is I feed them, and they need me to serve up the food and that’s their true motivation!

If you guess what a customer’s motivation is and then ask them you may well be surprised when they are truthful… it may not be what you assumed at all!

I reckon that it is well worth making an effort to understand a person’s motivation. Usually people are quite frank about this and their answer helps you positively address their problem or sell them what the truly need to succeed. When we can do that, we will find we have very loyal customers!

Tony Whale

CES Showcases Content Anywhere. Here’s a Real-World Reality Check.

Colleen Quinn — 1/12/2010

So, I’m writing this blog on the 12th of January, 2010. Who knows, really, what day you’re actually reading it. The 12th is a significant day, however, in that it is a day after January 10, 2010—the day CES wrapped for the year. CES has been the harbinger of new technologies and gadgets to come for years—and this year, like last year, proved to be one of the most exciting yet. E-Readers, mobile gadgets, the ever-watched tablet (from both Microsoft and Apple). All graced the floor at CES.

And, while I dutifully planned to blog about these devices and their implications to our business, it’s going to have to wait. I am just too angry at the moment. Here’s why—just when I thought we were making progress with actual IP ownership (see my previous blog post on the Disney Keychest initiative) through both independent studio efforts and collaborative initiatives from content owner consortiums to promote the cyber-locker concept, I’ve hit a personal, significant barrier. Thus, I’m angry.

Here’s why: I want my American version of The Office. It’s that simple. I bought it through the Amazon VOD service a couple of months ago for the premium price of $40-bucks—not an insignificant price for a single season of a TV-series. We are a family of technology zealots, and believe in practicing what we preach. And, we bought it with the understanding that Amazon would store this in the cloud for us. When Amazon first introduced their VOD service, storage of content in their cloud was the only option—though they’ve since introduced download options for wary content-buyers who want to have “physical” ownership of what they buy, even if it’s just 1’s and 0’s.

We should have been more wary. We bought the series—along with dozens of other titles in our library—and left our content to be managed by the Amazon cloud. Then, we relocated our family to France for a bit. All good, right? How bad can life in France be? Well, try to watch The Office with me and you’ll find out.

Kid asleep. Fire burning. Settled on the couch, with the Mac on my lap, we logged-in. And, “Voila,” as they say here. Nothing. “You are in the wrong country”, we were essentially told. You can’t access your content here. IP detection communicated our location—but it shouldn’t have mattered. We weren’t trying to buy new content. We simply wanted access to what was already ours.

I’ve been in the business a long time, and have a deep appreciation of the complexity of licensing deals. In years past, I’ve been in the unhappy position of having shows I’ve produced yanked off the air or delayed extensively due to incomplete clearances. Licensing is tough. So, I would expect that Amazon’s terms with their licensors might prevent the sale of content to consumers not located in the territory for which the licensee has a right to sell.

But understand this—we were in the United States when we bought the titles we now wanted to view from France. “Bought” is the operative word here. We didn’t rent the titles. We didn’t pay for a single use, or a finite series of uses. We bought it outright. Which means, to make this painfully obvious, we own it. And, if we own it, we should be able to consume it any where we darn well please.

I don’t believe in steps backward, but imagine this same scenario with a piece of physical content. Standards conversion issues aside (e.g. NTSC vs. PAL), if I have the media and right device, I can watch the DVD I own, any where (and, give it to my friends to watch, for that matter). Or, the same scenario downloaded to our machines--I access the file, and watch where ever I am, as long as I have access to where the file is stored.

The promise of the cloud is that it unburdens content owners (and businesses and people of every sort, really) from having to manage either the physical media or the physical storage device. And, there are no/limited conditions for accessing those files and data from the cloud.

I’m not giving up on the cloud—and I’m still a huge fan of the VOD service. But, there are hurdles that the content community needs to overcome in order for their services to be viable and consistent with the philosophy of IP ownership. I’m confident we’ll get there…

Now, let’s focus on more important matters. Has anyone seen Pam and Jim’s wedding?

Colleen Quinn

*Image Source:allmoviephoto.com

Headline: Everything is new again

Sandra Worley — 1/12/2010

The dawning of a new year sparks many of us to freshen our outlooks, set new goals and think in new ways. TeradataMagazine.com is joining in this spirit with two new online exclusives.

Check out “A new frontier” to learn about the fresh possibilities for data analysis and insight on consumers that social media offers. New opportunities to track and measure sentiment from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as collaboration and networking opportunities, make social media a crucial trend to track.

Another online exclusive, “Delivering compliance and more,” delves into regulatory compliance. While not a new topic for most organizations, the slate of compliance requirements that companies face is growing. An enterprise data warehouse can facilitate compliance efforts while providing new value by improving operational efficiency and identifying new opportunities for profit.

At Teradata Magazine, we’re excited to deliver new content online, beyond what’s in the quarterly print edition. Keep an eye on our Web site for updates and new features as we continue to deliver new insights and information your business can use.

Mike Westholder

Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Ooohh it’s hot

rita zimmerman — 1/14/2010

The mercury has just 43 degrees outside, the office air conditioner is starting to struggle and we are discussing what that new office smell that seems to have appeared during the Christmas break is. It can only mean that it is time for some more of my ramblings.

The Christmas holiday was spent mostly around the house playing with the kids; a nice break from the throws of analytics and databases. Over the break I was talking to some friends who traveled to the US on a new airline player, so needless to say I was interested to see how the experience was. The beauty of Twitter is that I knew just how bad it was within minutes of them landing. Having paid for premium economy, they were down graded to economy, missed their US connection and ended up having to spend 6 hours in LAX (no one should have to spend that much time in LAX)!

They were generally treated very poorly and they did what we should all do - provided feedback to the airline, mostly in the hope that they would be compensated in some way. So after two phone calls that ended in “sorry but we can not help you” my friend got onto the web site and complained through the web site, not surprisingly no correspondence from the airline.

The surprise came upon the return check-in, the entire family was upgraded – was this Twitter, the phone calls or the email? The big concern is not the final outcome (which was good) but what it tells you about their backend systems.

1. Their telephone complaints department does not track complaints.

2. Their telephone complaints department is not empowered to resolve complaints.

3. Their web site does resolve complaints, and does not appear to be connected to the telephone complaint department.

4. The airline does not proactively communicate to customers.

For organisations that want to have the customer at the centre of what they do, they have to get some basic capabilities in place.

How well does your infrastructure manage the customer experience?

Daniel Tehan

On Holiday in Snowy Sheffield

David Placke — 1/11/2010

I have a confession to make: I didn’t check my e-mail once between going on holiday on the 23rd December and returning on the 4th of January. Despite the fact that I generally feel naked without my iPhone, I stepped away from my virtual desk and spent the whole holiday with my family. Clearly I should do this more often, as in my absence analysts from TraderHuddle.com, NJ.com and MSN Money added their endorsements to those that we had already received during 2009 from Merrill Lynch, Key Banc and Soleil Equity Research, amongst others, highlighting the performance of Teradata stock during the year and identifying ours as a stock to watch in 2010.

At any rate, I hope that all of you had a similarly relaxing time and, like me, you are returning to work relaxed and recharged. Happy new decade!

Whilst spending some quality time in my home town – Sheffield, in the UK - I couldn’t help but notice that the whole city appeared to be covered with billboard advertisements for Google’s new-ish Chrome web browser. I can’t ever remember seeing billboard advertisements for a web browser before, even at the zenith of the Microsoft versus Netscape clash, yet Google is paying hard cash to advertise a product that it is giving away for free. And is doing so in South Yorkshire; much loved by those of us fortunate enough to live here, but not generally acknowledged as the centre of the digital universe.

I have always understood that Google’s value to advertisers is based on the quality of its search engine and its ubiquity; Google can be accessed from any Internet-enabled device, hundreds of millions of us do so daily – and the search terms that we enter give clues to our intentions that enable Google to bring relevant advertisements to our attention.

The moment that this ubiquity is threatened, Google becomes much less interesting to all of us – and by extension, much less interesting to the advertisers that provide the vast majority of its revenues. Despite this, Google is investing substantial sums of R&D money in developing its own web browser, PC operating system, smart phone operating system and now, as of last week, it’s own Smart Phone – two of which it gives away for free - and further large sums of money in promoting them, even in relative digital backwaters like Sheffield.

Why is Google doing this? A recent article in the Economist (“Phoney Wars”) says that this behaviour is intended “to protect [Google’s] lead in the online-advertising arena”. But if that lead is indeed based on Google’s ubiquity, it doesn’t need own-label operating systems, browsers and hardware to protect it, because Google can already be reached from every Internet-enabled device – and any new device that attempted to prevent or restrict access to Google would surely be rejected by the market. In fact, you could argue that the reverse is the case; that, for example, if those of us packing iPhones came to understand that Google would in future only be prepared to offer us a “tier 2” service unless we “upgraded” to a Google smart phone, then we might defect to other search and SaaS providers, actually reducing Google’s reach - and hence those vital advertising revenues.

Incidentally, research undertaken by ZenithOptimedia suggested that worldwide advertising waste - defined as money spent on messages that reached the wrong audience or none at all - reached more than $200 billion in 2007. If you are not entirely convinced that buying billboard advertising space in Sheffield is the most efficient way to target micro-segments of customers with relevant offers, based on precise insights into their buying patterns, behaviors and preferences across all channels, then make a New Year’s resolution to talk to us about Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM).

But I digress. Whatever Google’s real motivation is in all of this, it is set to be another fascinating year for technology watchers. In a future post, I’ll lay out our own exciting plans that will help us to continue to grow throughout 2010 - and beyond.

Martin Willcox
Director of Product & Solutions Marketing (EMEA)
Teradata Corporation

What’s Hot & What’s Next in Retail Intelligence? Find Out From Teradata

Darryl McDonald — 1/8/2010

The retail industry’s big annual show sponsored by the National Retail Federation opens Monday in New York – and Teradata will be there, raising intelligence! In the same way our database platforms provide insight and foresight for seventy percent of the world’s top retailers, our team will show and tell exactly what’s hot and what’s next in retail intelligence in 2010. Please visit us at NRF booth 1453 and learn more about the ways retailers are squeezing more value out of the huge detailed information assets they have. It’s all about high-speed advanced analytics, and that’s a well-known sweet spot for Teradata.

We know that smarter shoppers are expecting smarter sellers in retail as the action is happening on every possible selling channel – especially online. The IT analysts call it ‘multichannel, multi-step customer relationship management.’ That translates to engaging individual customers with relevance and consistency anywhere, anytime. And merchants know they had better have the detailed information shoppers want as they make buying decisions. In 2010, integrated web intelligence, using atomic level interaction data with a data warehouse … will be as hot as the surface temperature of Venus. That’s about 900 degrees F – hot enough to melt the market!

Demand forecasting is also getting hotter in 2010, and big retailers are relying more than ever on predictive projections and analytics to optimize demand chain performance.

As for me, I am excited about retail – despite the economic pressures. In the past year we’ve seen more retailers choose Teradata for database intelligence – and many of our existing retail customers are expanding their data warehousing and information optimizing capabilities. The list includes Home Depot, Amazon.com, Rakuten, Aeropostale, Cabela’s, Shop Direct, Sheetz, Haggen, Tesco, Williams-Sonoma, JD Williams, GAP Inc., JCPenney, Sears, METRO, Overstock.com, Limited Stores and Carrefour.

As cold as it’s been outdoors lately, there’s a lot that’s hot in retail. The NRF show will continue to be a great place to find out what’s warming up. So follow the business heat to New York City and look for Teradata. We can tell you what the retail temperatures are.

Darryl

Tomorrow’s smartest way to pay

David Placke — 1/6/2010

Credit cards used to be branded as the high-flyer’s way to pay, partly because they originally targeted the business jet set. Paying by credit card was smart. It was promoted as a sophisticated hint that you have a neat income at your disposal. Needless to say, this has fundamentally changed. In the US alone, there are five times more credit cards than consumers, not least because they are often used as an easy way to get short-term credit. In Europe, market penetration may not be that deep, as many consumers have alternatives that they prefer (e.g. debit cards, overdraft agreements and so on). Nevertheless, credit cards have become widely used and accepted. It has simply taken a bit longer for consumers to start valuing the comfort entailed with their usage.

Comfort? If you are looking for a new, easy and therefore “smart” way to make transactions, payment by mobile phones would be the obvious thing. The trouble is that you haven’t always got the option. You can, for example, buy railway or local transport tickets in some countries, and there are cities that have established similar systems for their parking fees. There is a variety of payment systems, but some of them have already disappeared due to lack of consumer demand. Why? I think the history of credit cards teaches us why – they were not widely used until they were universally accepted (some of them originally bought you dinner at only a handful of restaurants) and the same applies to mobile payment systems.

Sooner or later, this obstacle will be overcome. But who will take the initiative? Network operators might take their chances and make such an offering by themselves, shaking up the financial services market by leveraging their gatekeeper power over the channel. It could be interesting to explore this idea but I think that a different scenario is more realistic: Eventually, banks, credit card companies and network operators will cooperate to establish a common standard, along with retail, transport and other businesses that would wish to offer this new means of payment. I think it will take a broad alliance to get mobile payment to take-off in the first place. Only then will customers experience the extra comfort that will motivate them to accept the surcharge that inevitably comes along with new payment systems.

Customer insight and fraud detection
From a data warehousing perspective, there would be two relevant side-effects: If network operators play their cards well, they could gain insight into their customers’ transactions just like banks already have. Financial institutions, on the other hand, could get to know their customers even better if they received geospatial data along with the transactional details. Smart applications might also enhance mobile phones as a communication channel – few customers would want to decide on their loans or investments en route, but some may like to study a bank’s offering on their way home.

There is still the question of safety, as with any other transaction that is carried out electronically. Consumers don’t bear the risk of stolen credit card data, so they would hardly accept mobile payment service unless they get the same guarantees. At this point, highly reliable fraud detection capabilities, which have been pioneered by credit card companies in recent decades, will be indispensible. The backbone of these capabilities is active data warehousing that helps the companies to identify suspicious transactions in near-real time and seek confirmation before they process them any further. In the end, smart payment systems will require smart organizations that know how to leverage their data.

Simon Doherty

2010 or 2016???– A HEX on you!

David Placke — 1/6/2010

At first I thought the news reports of EFTPOS systems at a bank here in Australia not working with a ‘Y2K’ type of bug on New Year’s day were exaggerated – but the article in Tuesday’s Sydney Morning Herald Welcome to 2016: EFPOS Glitch Spreads points to a wider global problem. As soon as I read that 2010 was being interpreted as 2016 by the EFTPOS terminals I knew that the old HEX system was at the heart of it. But why? It is such an obvious thing to test for. Is ‘programming’ so easy and intuitive these days that some of the fundamentals are ignored? A rhetorical question maybe – but as someone who had to debug program dumps in octal I used to cringe at the thought of expanding my arithmetic literacy to HEX – adding A-F required a bit more mental agility than good old 0-7. Back then I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t working on the mainframe.

So what are some of the lessons learned?

Testing - Whether the bug was caused by the software itself at a code level or by interface protocols being incorrectly aligned doesn’t matter. The main issue for me is why wasn’t either scenario included as part of a testing plan? Have we gone so far with our ‘plug and play’ open interfaces that we assume one side of the plug is OK? If so then what are the specs?

Backup systems – well for this problem taxis are still very competent with the old ‘paper in the machine’ system – their electronic systems are regularly (and conveniently) out of order. Ever noticed that? Well, it seems that normal EFTPOS systems are so reliable that most people don’t seem to have the ‘old way’ on hand any more or staff trained in how to use them. I also expect the back-office paperwork and additional time just to get paid is also a significant disincentive and maybe this function has gone by the wayside as a cost saving measure.

Other commentary from an article in wmexperts Year 2016 bug plaguing text messages? on the issue points to a possible binary to hex misalignment:

010110 is binary for 22 not 16
But you are correct that 10 is 16 in Hex.
Submitted by gus (not verified) on Fri, 01/01/2010 - 19:50.
• reply

010110 = 16 using binary coded decimal. but should be written as 00010110

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 01/01/2010 - 20:24.
• reply

Oh okay I see what you mean. 010110 in binary is 16 in Hex. 0001 0110 = 1 6 or 16 Hex

Anyway, whatever the cause and domino effect the fact remains, in my opinion, that a fundamental building block of software, ie the use of codes (and/or notation), was not tested.

I am flabbergasted because so many of these types of issues have been known for so long they should not occur now, for example managing a divide by zero which would crash a system or doing all arithmetic in integer and cents because floating point would create non-reconcilable numbers. That was why you did it – it was just coding practices from experience.

What else can I say – I am lost for words that in this day and age such obvious errors can occur and I’m glad that I’m not accountable [for IT divisions] anymore ☺.

Hot off the press – bug now fixed! Back from the future: normal Eftpos service resumes

Christine Page-Hanify

Happy New Year!

Sandra Worley — 1/4/2010

With the closing of the first decade of the third millennium (I know many people argue that the decade doesn’t end until 2011), I can’t help but look to the future. Many businesspeople are resolving to do more with Web analytics in the coming year and decade. Those who aren’t should peruse the current issue of Teradata Magazine online.

In it, Webtrends CEO Alex Yoder talks about the opportunities that abound for those willing to combine online and offline data. In Guest Perspective, he writes, “Pulling together the offline and online data—conjoined marketing—will empower companies by letting them analyze every aspect of customer data and, most importantly, act upon it decisively. Doing so in real time is a major challenge but one that will yield considerable results.”

Partner Connection, “Fusing two worlds into one,” describes the role of Teradata and its Web analytics partners in capturing and loading Web and traditional data into the data warehouse using the Teradata Integrated Web Intelligence offering. With this information at hand, organizations can better analyze customers’ trends and behaviors.

The benefit of using Web data, such as lower costs, better convenience and simpler tracking capabilities, is explored in “Data Links.” Adding this information accumulated through the Web to the conventional data already gathered and stored makes the 360-degree view of the customer an attractive and reachable outcome.

And isn’t that what every organization wants, regardless of the decade?

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Teradata coming to a Universe near you!

rita zimmerman — 1/14/2010

Teradata Universe will be held in Sydney on Monday March 22, 2010 (Pre-conference Workshop) and Tuesday March 23, 2010 (Teradata Universe Sydney) and in Melbourne on Thursday March 25, 2010.

Senior Executives from global Teradata Customers Bank of America, DHL, eBay, JD Williams to name a few will present best practice case studies on the Advantage of Analytics, Unlocking ERP, Multiple Platforms, Information Consolidation, Value Management, Governance and Innovation.

These high level business focus presentations will be complimented throughout the day by an experience hall, featuring ‘birds of a feather’ stations, one on one meetings and ‘ask the expert’ discussions, coffee catch ups, and live demonstrations. A series of interactive industry specific workshops will bring all the information together and how this relates to you.

I encourage you to join our Linked In group for regular updates on What’s New at Teradata Universe. Please join us on the day and participate in valuable industry specific group discussions, get involved in the interactive demonstrations in the experience hall and finish the day by networking with colleagues and peers at the cocktail drinks.

Alec Gardner

Predicting the Future

rita zimmerman — 2/3/2010

This time of year always finds me in reflective mood, contemplating the year-not-quite-yet-behind us - what I might have done differently, or better - and so the invitation to travel to Finland and to present to a TDWI meeting on “Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence 5 Years From Now” was irresistible.

Between ruminating on the recent past – and speculating about future data warehousing, circa 2015 – I forgot to check the weather forecast. This turned out to be a serious mistake, as the daytime temperature in Helsinki last week was -14 degrees Celsius and I had packed nothing warmer than a summer raincoat and had omitted to bring hat, gloves or scarf with me. When the local Teradata team politely enquired if I would be able to manage the short walk to the restaurant for lunch, I told them, in best British stiff-upper lip style, that “cold was a state of mind” and that I would be fine. I was still shivering with cold several hours later!

Predicting the future is, of course, fraught with difficulty, but hopefully my professional predictions will turn out to be more valuable than my ability to prophesy the winter weather in Finland. At any rate, I was rash enough to make five predictions about the state of data warehousing and business intelligence in the next decade in my presentation. If you can find some time over the festive season to contribute your own perspective on industry trends and where they might lead us five years from now, we’d love to hear from you, so do please join the debate.

Lastly, I thank you all for your interest in Teradata and for your time and attention in 2009; best wishes to you and yours for a relaxing holiday surrounded by friends and family and I look forward to speaking with you all in 2010.

Martin Willcox

It's festive time again

rita zimmerman — 1/14/2010

So another year is fast approaching an end, the tree is up and the little people in my house are very excited about the prospect of presents.

When many of us think about Christmas we think about Santa Claus or Jesus’ birthday, however according to Wikipedia the Christians stole the festival from the pagan’s winter solstice festival, and Santa Claus was stolen from the Dutch Sinterklaas. Who would bring presents to the good Dutch children and take the bad Dutch children away to Spain, ironic that the Dutch now holiday in Spain (be aware that I may have taken some liberty in my interpretation of the Dutch holiday).

So in my stress filled Christmas shopping experience the other weekend, how do you buy a present for a little girl without her seeing you buying the present when you need to ensure that the helmet fits (she’s getting a bike but don’t tell her), I got to thinking about the logistics of Christmas.

I have to get the tree, the shop has to get hundreds of trees, I have to get the ham, the butcher has to get hundreds of hams, and so on. I get that retailers plan for this time of year for a very long time, but it is so easy for it to go very wrong. As an example Thomas the Tank Engine is particularly popular this year, I know as it took my parents three different shopping centres to source the James engine that was required for their grand daughter. Imagine having to ensure that you have enough stock ordered, then ensure that you have enough stock on the shelf every day before Christmas without having excess stock that has to be discounted come the 26th.

I have a list that has to be constantly updated in the lead up to the big day, I would hate to see a retailers list. I know that the retailers have advanced systems with lots of data and sophisticated planning algorithms combined with very smart people that bring it all together.

So to those people and systems and data, thank you for another year.

Daniel Tehan

Plenty of puzzles

rita zimmerman — 12/31/2009

Readers of Teradata Magazine are no doubt used to solving multiple puzzles in their jobs every day. Whether it’s tailoring the right message to specific customers or debugging some problematic code, puzzles pop up everywhere you look.

And while work would be much easier without these countless riddles, they provide the new and exciting challenges that make work interesting. The payoff comes from the sense of accomplishment in solving the mysteries you come across. The more difficult the puzzle, the better it feels to conquer it.

For those looking for a more fun puzzle, check out Teradata Magazine’s online Dataplay game. This issue’s Dataplay asks you to “See through the clutter” by correctly selecting spheres that contain the correct word to describe their color, ignoring the color of the text. Players who correctly solve this timed puzzle will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a Mimo 710-S portable USB monitor.

But don’t wait too long! The contest’s deadline for the current issue is Jan. 4, 2010, so don’t miss your chance to master another puzzle.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

The Now Economy

Darryl McDonald — 12/31/2009

Welcome to the now economy! What does that mean? It means customers want relevant, up-to-date information and a clear understanding of what the information means now (not later).

The expectation of speed and low tolerance for lag time has grown in parallel with Moore’s law, which says microprocessor performance should double every two years, and with advances in the internet and mobile devices.

Those advances mean faster performance on networks and hardware. But they mean something else as well: the faster people go, the faster they expect to go. Customers want problems resolved as soon as they occur.

Can your company do that? Even better, can you address customer issues before they become customer complaints? Here’s an example: a high-value airline customer isn’t going to make his connecting flight. Does he have to wait to deplane and go to the gate agent to get a new flight? Or do the airline systems “know” the customer won’t make his flight and automatically book him on a new flight? Does he get a text message telling him he’s been rebooked, or does he have to wait in line with 100 other people?

Think about your typical IT workday: too much data to handle and process. It can frustrate any manager. Because they (and we) know that in a dynamic marketplace, competitors gain share by making sense of data and acting on it first. No manager wants to get an e-mail from the boss wondering why a competitor acted earlier on a market shift.

The technologies to accomplish this -- and many transactions like it -- do exist now. They’re available from Teradata, where we help our customers respond to the needs of their customers and do it immediately, shifting from being driven by hindsight to one of foresight.

Are you keeping your customers waiting? If so, it’s time to join the now economy in this New Year!

Darryl

Let’s raise our glasses...to those who raise intelligence

Darryl McDonald — 12/18/2009

It just keeps getting better. Three more Teradata customers have won awards for their data warehouse-driven information systems. Nationwide Insurance has just won two Performance Awards for BI Leadership and Information Applications from Ventana Research. And just days ago, two more Teradata customers, Hallmark and Cabela’s, won prestigious national awards (and so did we)! The GOLD awards were presented at the National Center for Database Marketing (NCDM) conference. It was “déjà vu all over again” for Teradata, because our customers have earned many awards for creating business value. This calls for a toast: may the Teradata community keep on winning world recognition for raising intelligence in 2010! That’s what we do best.

On the awards front, we’ve done really well in the past 12 months, with a lot of important recognition:

Teradata customers were recognized by Computerworld Magazine in October for excellence in the use of Enterprise Intelligence. These included AT&T, who reported that Teradata has saved the company more than a billion dollars over the course of its collaboration (see link!)
Computerworld also recognized winners RBC Financial Group, the United States Postal Service, ARC, and Australian Pharmaceutical Industries. There were also many fantastic finalists – also named in the Computerworld news release.
German retailer METRO was honored with an EHI Retail Technology Award
Maybank, the largest financial services organization in Malaysia, received a 2009 Financial Insights Innovation Award for its Teradata CRM program
Three customers won The Data Warehouse Institute “Best Practices” awards: ARC, Freescale Semiconductor, and GE Rail Services.
Freescale won a BeyeNETWORK Vision Award with Teradata for Business Impact
Teradata was included in BusinessWeek’s InfoTech 100, the world’s best performing technology companies.
Nationwide Insurance and Sabre Air were honored as Computerworld Laureates for “the use of IT to benefit society.”
Telecomm carrier Etisalat was honored at the BSS Summit for use of IT in customer care
Discover Card CIO Glenn Schneider and Haggen Stores CIO Harrison Lewis were honored for IT systems excellence and listed in the 2009 CIO magazine “Top 100 CIO’s”
Teradata was rated the industry’s number one enterprise data warehouse platform in the “Current Offering” category in “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms, Q1 2009,” released February 6, 2009 by Forrester Research.
Teradata was positioned as a leader by Gartner in three categories: The Data Warehouse DBMS Magic Quadrant, The Data Warehouse DBMS Server Evaluation Model, and the Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management
Teradata was selected for the seventh consecutive time by Intelligent Enterprise for the magazine’s 2009 Editors’ Choice Awards -- “The Dozen” – their elite list of “the most influential vendors.”

In addition, many Teradata customers submitted outstanding contest entries and were named as finalists, and we applaud you all! Best wishes and Happy Holidays! Bring on 2010!

Darryl

To eTOM or not to eTOM

David Placke — 12/18/2009

Like many of us in the Telco industry, I’ve been monitoring the works of the TMF (TeleManagement Forum) for a number of years now, and despite having occasionally pondered how I might employ their models, [now referred to as the TM Forum Solution Frameworks (NGOSS) comprising; eTOM (Enhanced Telecom Operations Map), SID (Shared Information/Data Model), TNA (Integration Framework), and TAM (Telecoms Applications Map)] I have never really made any substantial commitment of energy to their adoption. Now I have an opportunity to do this I am wondering how effective the result might be given my uncertainty of the level of use of these models by the industry.

The issue I have is whichever way you look at it, to adopt a new model and methodology will incur significant establishment and maintenance costs. And while these may only be in consultant-hours terms (and perhaps some training and membership fees), I am acutely conscious of the benefits, or more to the point – the drawback, of doing so. After all, we all want some bang for our buck, right? Naturally, the fact that it might be my own time wasted on this never entered my mind.

Nevertheless, I have the perfect problem for a TMF Solutions Framework. This, as you might imagine, arises from the fact that I work for Teradata where deriving business value from ‘data’ is the essence of the game. In this context I am often asked “how can I use my information more?” or “where are my business opportunities to derive more value from my information assets?” Distilled, these might read: which business processes can I make more efficient, effective, or less costly by leveraging data assets.

The answer to these questions is really very simple: “do something you are not already doing with your data”. But it is the task of articulating what this means in real terms of: which business process?, what data?, what action?, and so-on, for the plethora of possible cases in a Telco (and other industries for that matter) which present the real challenge. That’s where I see the TMF frameworks eTOM and SID playing a key role.

What we are talking about here is a model of Telco business processes (using eTOM) correlated with the data resident in a Telco (using SID) such that analysis and communication of data driven, business analytics opportunities is enabled.

“Hmmm. Sounds familiar”, I hear the Teradata informed say. And you’re right, remarkably so in fact. Teradata has actively developed and employed a suite of consulting tools during decades of working in this space. I refer here or course to the Teradata BIO maps (Business Improvement Opportunity), LDM (Logical Data Models), and EDWr (Enterprise Data Warehouse Roadmap) planning tools and methodologies.

This then begs the question of, “what is the purpose of this idea in the first place if Teradata already has such models?” To which the unambiguous answer is “standardisation” – the adoption of the constructs, terminology, language and methodology in widespread use by the industry, and as solidified to a standard set by TMF, with a view to availing of all the usual benefits afforded by such a ‘common communications protocol’.

Or is it? In widespread use that is. Because if not my case begins to unravel. Which brings me back to my concerns in the first instance: What is the level of adoption of the TMF Frameworks within the industry? How familiar are professionals working in the industry with these models? How useful is it going to be to adopt eTOM and SID in the context of business analytics?

I’m very interested in any and all views here of your own experience with the TM models, and also if anybody is aware of any market research in this area.

Dave Horder

Big news in ’09

Sandra Worley — 12/15/2009

One of the game-changing moments of 2009 took place at April’s Teradata Universe conference in Istanbul. There, SAP and Teradata announced an agreement to provide SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on the Teradata Database.

For joint customers of SAP and Teradata, the strengthened partnership will deliver a seamlessly integrated and scalable solution that lowers total cost of ownership and consolidates data on one database platform. They will benefit from an integrated end-to-end offering.

To expound upon this intriguing development, Teradata Magazine went straight to the top: Mike Koehler, president and CEO of Teradata, and John Schwarz, a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG and CEO of BusinessObjects SA. They are featured in a Q&A about this partnership in the current issue.

As Schwarz notes, “Expanding our relationship with Teradata will provide customers with the flexibility to use SAP applications with Teradata Active Enterprise Intelligence™ solutions, ensuring that they get the best of both worlds.”

These benefits are abundantly apparent to joint customers, many of whom are excited about the new possibilities.

“Organizations that leverage massive amounts of information using Teradata solutions and SAP applications are pleased by the promise of tighter integration and closer collaboration,” Koehler explains.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

The Second Coming…Can Time Inc. Save the Magazine Business and Make Magazines Measurable?

Colleen Quinn — 12/15/2009

It’s a good day when you have so many different Blog post possibilities that you actually have to choose. That’s me this morning. Possible topics: our household’s new addiction to GPS-related services; the fact that I was *right* about a predicted industry trend in Hollywood; my apparent mid-life crisis which yielded an unplanned and unbudgeted purchase of a very shiny bauble last night.

But, the winner for today’s post? A possible savior for the ailing print publishing industry The idea is the brainchild of Time Inc., publisher of 21 U.S. magazines including Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine, Fortune, and my favorite, People.

This week, Time Inc. with web-design and branding powerhouse The Wonder Factory, introduced an online demonstration of the Sports Illustrated (SI) interactive magazine of the future. The demo, which already has more than 330,000 views on Youtube, promises to deliver much of what traditional print cannot: rich interactive features, integrated video and text, games, targeted content based on user preferences. It’s like a weekly website.

The death of traditional publishing has been heralded for the last 10 years. But, there’s nothing sudden about its demise. It’s more like a long, disabling illness that erodes a person over time. Print ad revenues have been declining precipitously for years. New magazine launches have virtually ground to a halt; and too many print publications have shuttered their doors. One of the latest casualties is National Geographic’s Adventure Magazine. On December 3rd, the mag announced it was shutting down it’s print operations effective this month, despite an impressive subscriber base of 430,000. The culprits are easy: increased distribution costs, virtually no newsstand sales compared to sub base and a 44% plummet in ad revenue through 3rd quarter this year compared to last year. Ouch.

But, Adventure, like many magazines, is in a state of transition. A statement from National Geographic Society (NGS) reads, in part:
“…Adventure brand from traditional print to a multi-platform model that will include newsstand editions, books, e-magazines, mobile applications and a robust Web site.”

Migrating a brand from print to web is not enough. That’s why I think Time Inc. is on to something. The demo showcases a rich, interactive environment where advertisers have the flexibility and creativity offered through a web-like channel. But richness of user experience won’t save the industry.

Measurability, however, might.

The SI demo doesn’t touch on this. In fact, in its current incarnation, there are more than a few issues—the most major being that the “magazine” functions, it seems, on yet another proprietary e-reading device. Who in an ideal world, the SI demo would deliver:

Full measurability of user behavior, clicks, engagement, preferences
• Interoperability across multiple e-readers, the iPhone, any many other devices
• Targeted content and advertising delivery to finally deliver on higher ad revenues promised by web-targeting
• And, maybe even a new advertising model altogether

It will be interesting to see how the concept evolves in 2010, and what its real-world impacts on the publishing business might be. Publishing needs a second coming in 2010. True measurability might be the answer.

Colleen Quinn

The Internet of Things - What an opportunity!

David Placke — 12/14/2009

Lately, I’ve seen a surge of new offers for real applications that use Sensor Data to deliver a valued service. This has me thinking about how data warehouses are primarily oriented towards the transactions of people – phone calls, grocery purchases, web browsing… all of this relates to people, and their daily actions.

Going on around us, almost invisibly, is another world, the world of “Things”. Things like cars, washing machines, heat pumps… Today there are very few “Things” that do not have some type of sensor that generates data. Sensors can measure temperate, motion, location, light, acceleration, current, radiation, flows, biometrics e.g. heart rate or pulse, oxygen levels, RFID etc. Today many of our “Things” are in fact internet enabled or can be.

Hence the term “Internet of Things”.

The Internet has enabled communications between people and Things very well. What’s missing? Well how do we address the data of Things and analyse it in a valuable, meaningful way? How do we correlate the data output from Things and relate that to customers/people? It is possible and I will share two examples that I think show the potential of using a data warehouse to analyse and understand Things!

First off my current favorite – Fedex SensorAware.

This is a device that measures location (via GPS), acceleration, temperature and light and can transmit this data over a mobile data network from “inside” your package. This enables tracking of your package and monitoring of what can be important environmental variables. You don’t want frozen food to thaw, or a disk drive to be dropped.

And the London Oyster card.

Likely the world’s largest and most successful RFID card implementation with over 10 million cards in circulation. Used for something like 5 Million trips per day in the greater London area. It has largely replaced cash ticket purchases.

This card is a “prepaid” Train and Bus ticket. It can be topped up at Kiosks or Online. For the big brother worriers, today you don’t need to register your name and can use it anonymously.. However if you do register you can view all your trips, top-up on-line and freeze your card if you loose it and get a new one with the remaining balance.

The data from Oyster can be used for transport and route planning.

There are many more examples out there in use today. Data from Things is an opportunity to differentiate data warehousing solutions and include new data sources to deliver better business outcomes for all.

The sensor data can be very usefully analysed by statistical analysis tools to provide previously unknown insights, correlations and relationships.

So I suggest you do have a good think about the Things out there, which can be a valuable data source, as well as the customer transactions when building a data warehouse. You may well be surprised!

Tony Whale

Does The Australian Public Service (APS) Need a modern-day Great Library?

David Placke — 12/14/2009

According to the Canberra Times Newspaper, 40 percent of Government Leaders in Senior Executive Service (SES) and 30 percent of Executive Level (EL) positions will be eligible to retire during the next 5 years. With such a massive exodus of key strategic minds and thinkers, the Australian Federal Public Service is due to take some action to stop the "brain drain". To lose this proportion of corporate knowledge in such a short timeframe would be disastrous if left unmitigated.

The acting APS Commissioner Carmel McGregor was interviewed on these issues for a November 27 Canberra Times article "Public Service Growth Slows". Ms McGregor is reported as having said the she is "'ready to reform to meet future challenges." but understands that "[only] 8 per cent of our agencies report having active talent-management strategies in place to help manage that." I believe that the talent management issues pale in comparison to the lack of Government-wide body of knowledge.

The APS is willing to take measures to mitigate the "brain drain" in Federal Government, Ms McGregor is clear about that. However, tomorrow's leaders do not just need to be found and fostered, they need access to the right information, from operational to strategic, to govern properly and make informed decisions. Without the old hands, senior advisors and mentors, it will be a reliance on what memories and data are scattered around an organisation. Without a recorded, fact-based history, the APS is trying to memorise business models, policies, decades of operational data and strategic decisions that made the heroes and villains of yaw. With much of the corporate memory walking out the door, what is the opportunity cost of not having acquired and stored operational and strategic histories of the APS? I will let you be the judge.

The broader family of Australian Public Service (APS) agencies does not have a "Great Library" that provides an insight into the past. The "who, what, when, where and why" of an industry and few elders to relate the stories of old by word of mouth is a significant risk. You can lose knowledge as fast as civilisation went from Roman times into the Dark Ages in just a few short years. To their credit, the Government sector are onto the people issues and are publicly recognising the challenge, but have not yet identified the information gap. The sentiments are positive but where is Charlemagne when you need him?!

With an age of transparency and accountability facing governments around the world, the APS needs to create a central body of knowledge that keeps its history, policies and corporate knowledge alive. Such a repository would provide an accessible and authentic body of knowledge for the next generation of leaders to measure and govern. Predicting or working out what worked and what didn't from the past is fundamentally important. What is even more important is finding the relationships and differences between efficiencies and inefficiencies, successes and failures to understand the question of "where to next?" under fresh leaders and thinkers.

With change comes opportunity. Old policies, methods and processes could be ripe for reform as there is a changing of the guard in the leadership of the APS. Being able to specifically understand what worked and what didn't with a facts base will be key in baselining Government operations under new leadership. So having integrated data in an accessible and trusted place is almost as good as having a virtual king's advisor. The context for understanding the past, predicting the future and knowing what is happening now are the cornerstones of a successful future government paradigm.

I hope that the concept of the "APS Great Library" becomes a reality before any Vandals or Visigoths arrive to erase the past and stumble forward in the proverbial dark.

David Bremstaller

Hang 5 diagram

rita zimmerman — 12/8/2009

IT HANG 5: The Ride of Our Lives on the IT Wave

David Placke — 12/14/2009

Having written a reflective blog on where we started in IT and one on where the future of research may take us, it’s worth contemplating the journey from past to present and into the future. And what a ride it has been – and indeed, still is. I had thought of titling this blog ‘IT – the never ending journey’ but it seemed too much like fantasy (which the journey definitely is not) – and ‘Hanging 5’ at the local beach seemed much more tangible and fluid – besides tracking your surf board with a sensor or taking your water proof mobile (cell phone) is quite a reasonable scenario these days.

Being in IT as a technical professional has been an exhilarating and exciting ride. Nothing stays still (for long), new “toys” arrive to play with – and work had been a constant (and rewarding) learning experience. Lots of places – lots of industries. “Awesome” in today’s jargon. Even the idea of being in the ‘right place’ at the ‘right time’ doesn’t jell – because the IT time-line wave can be caught at anytime and the ride just as exhilarating. Today, I am regularly reminded of this constant change when I get the emails informing me that an on-line course/product update has been added to my Learning Plan and must be completed as part of my day-to-day obligation to ‘stay current’ and the Area ‘ready’ to support Teradata’s new products and services.

So what’s made the industry so dynamic? A lot of what we use computers (technology) for today were not even in science fiction 50 years ago. OK, so maybe Dick Tracey had a cool watch, and Andromeda was a test tube baby, but the constant contribution from incremental pure research effort, like Trent’s thesis work, which I talked about last time [Cruiser and PhoTable], provides a fertile ground for product innovation. There are many Australian inventions from the Hills Hoist to the Bionic ear that have forever changed our lives. By the way, don’t believe those who tell you that the Hills Hoist was invented as a clothesline – it was really designed as a backyard ‘swing-around’ which kids let their Mums use once a week!

Seriously though, the recent case over Australia’s CSIRO WiFi patent is a good example. The US patent 5,487,069 which was filed in November 1993 and issued in January 1996 was for the invention of “a peer-to-peer wireless LAN whereby mobile transceivers are each connected to, and powered by, a corresponding portable electronic device with computational ability.” This seemingly small invention is ubiquitous today – embedded in so many devices we take for granted: Our mobile phones, WiFi sound systems (for our surround sound) and computers at home (or work or in the park). Applied by vendors and products too numerous to mention.

This drawing is one of 8 diagrams submitted with the patent (makes a lot of sense – to some anyway).

Think about the initial benefit – no need for those kilometres of cables in the walls, under floors and in ceiling cavities – just to connect our computers, telephones or speakers. In fact just two years earlier (1993-94) I had my network team re-cable a whole building to get the higher connectivity speeds on offer and even laid second cables of fibre to ‘future proof’ the infrastructure as the cost of physically laying the cables was the major cost component – let alone the inconvenience for staff in each office to lay the cables. But by 1998 at a University I was working at, we were already embarking on Campus wireless ‘hot spots’ and lending wireless cards using the reserve books process in the Library. So in a four year period I had network infrastructure and new service deployment options.

Most BI applications today offer ‘reports’ or ‘alerts’ to a range of mobile devices while the iPhone has expanded the recipient market for information and created new application opportunities. Today you can surf for the best place to surf while on your board! Or if you are a land-lubber you can get all the stats for your jog from your shoe.

The real “high” of the IT wave has been delivered through sheer creativity in the application of basic concepts and invention. One invention solves many problems and creates a seemingly limitless set of new opportunities. It is in fact a ‘never ending’ journey. How cool is that!

Next episode – IT planning for the ‘never ending’ journey.

Christine Page-Hanify

An Ozzie for online excellence

Sandra Worley — 12/8/2009

Teradata Magazine online last week won a prestigious Ozzie Award as the Best Web Site Design among B-to-B magazines. In its annual awards, the magazine industry publication Folio gave the gold to the site’s designer, interactive agency Tocquigny.

Folio described the magazine Web site as “accessible and even fun.” It cited popular features, such as the Tech2Tech section, as well as archives, interactive games and polls.

Teradata Magazine online is also exploring the addition of video and Twitter components. With the reformatting of our Web site and addition of more socially interactive pieces, the magazine is evolving and innovating. Gone are the days of publications that focus exclusively on print. Thanks to the Internet, we can offer extensive ways to interact with readers. We are working hard to connect with you.

Clearly, the purpose of this blog is to generate conversation. That’s why we encourage your feedback here. You’re more than welcome to join the forum. What do you think about Teradata Magazine? Do you like the changes to the Web site? What types of articles would you like us to publish? Are we missing any important topics of interest? We want to know.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Understanding Value

David Placke — 12/4/2009

It is interesting when we talk about the value of a customer (sometimes referred to as profitability); there are a number of different rules of thumb presented as the best way to derive value. The approach tends to be determined by the use of the outcome, marketing wants to understand value to be able to differentiate services and offers, while finance wants to reconcile to the GL and so on. Some approaches have flexibility to be a little wrong and others strive for perfection. So there is no wonder that the conversation of customer value causes so much excitement in organisations.

The challenge that becomes evident very quickly is that there is no such thing as the perfect model or a right way to build a model, there is only a wrong way in the eyes of the end users. Users will never use a model once it has been deemed incorrect for purpose, hence the proliferation of profitability models in organisations. In my experience organisations have at a minimum 3 different profitability based models, there is no wonder that a profitability conversation is so passionate! How do you move towards accepting a single model?

The adoption of any model takes time, people need to understand the rules and assumptions that have been used when building the model, for all users to agree to its make up. Education needs to evolve with the capabilities of the organisation and model to ensure that people stay onboard. The complexity of the model needs to provide the end users of the model with the information required to perform their jobs.

The only gotcha is that the model needs to have the ability to become more complex over time, using more detailed information and more detailed rules as the organisation matures. On day one no user is going to be interested in drilling down five levels to understand the why’s, but in time they will, consequently the model needs to be able to support detailed investigation not just a score without any context.

Daniel Tehan

Got Vision?

Darryl McDonald — 12/2/2009

If there’s one thing we’ve all learned from the recent economic meltdown, it’s that transparency – in how we do business, in how we make decisions, in how we report our progress – is no longer optional. It’s essential.

And that’s really what our industry is all about. It’s about being able to see through mountains of data and all the everyday “noise” of doing business to make informed decisions, discover opportunities and drive efficiencies. It’s about connecting the dots, which is the focus of the latest issue of Teradata Magazine Online. Our new addition is just out, and it is chocked full of content related to this very topic.

In this issue’s lead story, Bill Tobey writes compellingly about how mandatory disclosure and forced transparency actually offer organizations an opportunity to create an analytical infrastructure that not only complies with the law but also delivers new insights and business agility.

That may be the reason that businesses are relying more and more on business analytics rather than gut feel or intuition, as reported by Accenture. In fact, 70% of organizations that participated in the Accenture study said they were looking to increase their use of analytics for decision-making.

One such company is Charming Shoppes, which has always had a strong commitment to investing in its BI infrastructure. Its ability to slice and dice data has become even more critical as consumer spending has decreased dramatically. At a time when other businesses would have backed off on upgrading systems, Charming Shoppes moved forward with a complete refresh, an investment that should give the company an edge moving forward.

That story is a good example of how organizations need to tailor their business intelligence solutions as needed to create a perfect fit. It’s not a one size fits all world, as Wayne Eckerson points out in his recent TDWI Best Practices report, which was excerpted in the magazine.

The rest of this issue of Teradata Magazine Online points to ways companies “order up” a custom technology infrastructure that gives them the transparency and decision clarity they demand. I hope you’ll take some time to visit Ozzie Award-winning TeradataMagazine.com and read the latest news and views from our writers, our partners, our customers and our industry’s experts. You won’t want to miss what they have to say.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Darryl

Ah, the holidays: Turkey, Family and a New-Kind of Consumerism

Colleen Quinn — 12/2/2009

In the aftermath of this Thanksgiving, and in anticipation of the holidays yet to come, I thought I’d share a post with my kind followers about the miracle of the season. I love Thanksgiving—I’d venture to say that it used to be my favorite of the holidays. But, this season—for what seems the first time ever—I’m catching the Christmas bug.

I give all credit (and blame) to my son Nathan, who is nearly four-years-old. If you read my posts at all, you’re likely tired of hearing about this child, but hear me out on this one. There is something genuinely infectious about a child’s enthusiasm for the holidays. So infectious that on this past Cyber-Monday, I tossed out every single, liberal (little “L”), pseudo-socialist parenting paradigm I’d enforced since my son’s arrival. I tossed out my anti-consumerist birthday/holiday policy (“No Presents Please!”) and absolutely loaded—I mean LOADED—my cyber-cart full of very noisy, battery-consuming, brightly colored, plastic, non-PC (think: weapons), fun toys for the child. Ah, the spirit of Christmas.

Apparently, I wasn’t alone. All signs point to healthy growth this Cyber-Monday. Some basic sales stats show nearly 14% increase in total sales for Cyber-Monday. And, perhaps boding poorly for brick-and-mortar retailers, sales also showed that we shoppers are shifting our purchases even more furiously to online channels: we bumped our average order size up nearly 40%, and we bought more items on Cyber-Monday than we did on Black Friday.

I’m not sure many of us are surprised to see online retail growing steadily, even in the face of a bleak economy. But, here is what I did find myself wondering as I drilled through thousands of toys on Amazon.com (the proprietor from whom I purchased every last item—thank you, free shipping!): what the hell is the “Barbie Doll'd Up Nails B-Nails Digital Nail Printer”?

It seems an insignificant question—or rather, one with short-reaching implications for the world of technology. Let me continue. The nifty product—which retails for a cool $179.99, mind you—spread like wildfire in popularity to assume the top-spot on the Christmas lists of my three savvy nieces, and many of their little friends. The “arsonist”—my friend Erin. She posted the thing on her Facebook page, re-posted from that of her friend, from that of her friend—and voila, I’m staring down the barrel at three volatile pre-teen girls who will soon be livid that their favorite aunt won’t fork-over $500+ for their hot-pink home manicure systems. I have nowhere to hide—there is a clear trail from them, to the product, to me.

My interest isn’t in this particular product, frankly. More, my interest is in the manner in which we all learned of its existence. Not through slickly produced TV-spots airing on Saturday mornings inserted into punky cartoons, not through the endless paper catalogs packing my mailbox daily, not through the onslaught of email offers clogging my SPAM filters. Nope. Facebook. I’ve yet to read much about the influence of Social Media on buying patterns this coming holiday season, but I can’t imagine the impact is insignificant.

Take the Zhu Zhu Hamster—a request from my own kid, but denied due to something I call the “Cabbage Patch Kid” phenomenon. I refuse to be extorted to procure one. It’s the hot toy this year. It has 215,000 blog post references on Google, and more than 3 million organic search results. Google, fine. That’s not social, I know.

How about this? YouTube. Across just three of the top Zhu Zhu videos, there are more than 500,000 combined views. Not huge by YouTube numbers (compare that to “Cutest Kitty” which hit 2.4 MM views today), but impressive. And, there are 300+ Zhu Zhu Hamster videos available altogether. This doesn’t include videos and views featuring the other Zhu Zhu pets. The Zhu Zhu Pet Facebook page boasts a moderate 200 followers, but their activity betrays their zealotry. Twitter? A hundred followers, and multiple hundreds of Tweets about the product today alone. Wait, 20 more Tweets since I started writing this darn sentence! Bing? It’s trending as #51 on the Top Xtreme Movers list.

My point? It’s not just the “Zhu Zhu Pet,” or the “Barbie Nail Whatever” that matter. What matters is that consumers are looking to and making buying decisions because of the influences from social media sites. This may be the marketing shift big brands have been anticipated since the words “Web 2.0” rudely infiltrated the Marketing lexicon. We’ll see what happens between now and the end of the season, but I suspect I’m not far off.

Perhaps we’ll all look back to this gift-giving season as the year that Christmas went social. I’ll certainly remember this season as the time I jumped full force into the consumerist playground that is Christmas with a three-year-old. Let the wrapping begin!

Colleen Quinn

I guess the GFC must have been my fault - sorry!

David Placke — 12/1/2009

So it must have been people like me that caused the GFC, or it feels that way because I am certainly being punished as a result of the blanket one fits all policy changes that the organisations I bank with have made, what about ME as a customer?

I certainly didn’t cause the crisis. I am a modest (or probably negligible) investor. I have a mortgage on the house I bought in London before emigrating to Australia. There is a pretty significant amount of equity in there, in spite of an estimated 15% drop in value in the last 2 years. It’s been rented almost the entire time since we left and even now, the rent still covers the mortgage.

I have been in Australia 5 years and have 2 young children who were both born here, it’s a good time to start looking at buying a home here. Or so I thought!

Problem number 1 – I live in Mosman.
OK, so that is my fault. It’s an expensive place but with a settled young family and my heavy involvement in the local community with Mosman Football Club (gratuitous plug!) I want to stay here. It’s pricey, I thought that there might be a slide in prices but no, they remain high so I need to pay a fair whack for a family home – but I can probably afford the repayments so it’s not really the problem.

Real Problem number 1 – I only have modest savings.
I use the term modest but it’s not bad. Though it’s not enough as it turns out as banks now want 20% deposit on the type of house I want. GFC you see, can’t take ‘risks’ - would have been OK a year ago though.

Doesn’t matter that I can afford the repayments and have a history that shows paying similar amounts in rent for 5 years?

Ok on to plan B then – get some of that lovely equity?

Problem number 2 – The blanket ‘foreigner’ rule.
I called my UK lender to repackage my mortgage (I chose badly and fixed so this was going to be a good move anyway) and at the same time release some of that equity to get my Australian deposit up to 20%.

“Can’t increase your borrowing Mr. Gardner, you receive a salary in a foreign currency”. GFC you see, can’t take ‘risks’ - would have been OK a year ago though.

I’ve been a customer for 15 years. I would be reducing my monthly payments and have a tenant signed for a year. Doesn’t matter apparently so all they could do was agree with me when I made what I thought was the excellent point that they were forcing me to move to another lender (lots of hassle) or sell the house (huge hassle).

Ok – forget the easier option as I am terrible at paperwork – sell the house.

Problem number 3 – Sterling
£1 = $1.79! This time last year was $2.30. In Aussie dollar terms my house (and therefore my equity) has gone down in value, massively.

The fall in the housing market, the UK recession, a large current account deficit and the strength of the Euro have all led to the falling Great British Pound. I have to say, I was in favour of the Euro from the off.

Ok, so I need more cash – better get a pay rise.

Problem number 4 – Boss said no
Not much to say on that one. He didn’t blame the GFC, he said something about less time blogging and more time doing real work.

So here I sit, in a rental property in Mosman. All my savings locked away. Some would say that is a ‘safe investment’ but I would like to own my home here. I wish the financial services companies (and the one in the UK in particular, who is not a Teradata customer I hasten to add) was able to avoid blanket policies that haven’t taken an individual view on me as a long standing, loyal and (I assume) fairly profitable customer.

Alec Gardner

Sneak Preview to the Universe

David Placke — 12/1/2009

We have set up a new site to help you find out early on what’s new at next year’s Teradata Universe Conference in Berlin. We hope this site proves to be a handy tool that suits your purposes. Conferences have densely filled schedules and we are aware that your time is precious during the event.

The site will allow you to spot the most interesting sessions and workshops in advance, take a look at the keynote speakers, and generally make plans for your stay in Berlin. Once you’re registered, you can also customize your own agenda and easily arrange 1:1 discussions with Teradata experts. The site will be permanently updated during the run-up to the conference so that you can complement your schedule to the very last minute and make sure you keep focussed during the conference.

At the same time, we will try to provide some additional inspiration on this blog. Our general idea is to give you fresh thoughts and relate them to people that will be available in Berlin. For example, we intend to feature some of our new technology partners in the coming months. We also have a few videos planned that will outline what’s on the agenda for which industry. And we will report on the ongoing events, just as we have done during the last conference in Istanbul.

Berlin is definitely an exciting place. Set free from its mural chains, the city has developed a remarkable dynamic. Right after the fall of the wall, Berlin became a giant construction site where cranes popped up like mushrooms in autumn. There may be fewer cranes by now, and still a lot to do. Still Berliners keep reinventing themselves in manifold, disparate ways. In all parts of the world, we have learned what a struggling economy feels like over the past 18 months or so. If you want to get an impression what it feels like to be on the meandering road to recovery, come to Berlin.

Mario Bonardo

I can see clearly now

Sandra Worley — 11/30/2009

As the importance of corporate transparency expands, organizations need quick access to reliable, consistent and auditable data. The latest issue of Teradata Magazine, which went live last week, explores how an enterprise data warehouse can help meet the challenges of corporate disclosure. At the same time, the enterprise data required for regulatory compliance—stored once and used many times over—can deliver competitive advantage.

In addition to our cover story on transparency, this issue features a great Q&A with Teradata CEO Mike Koehler and SAP BusinessObjects CEO John Schwarz. They discuss the exciting developments enabled by the strengthened partnership between SAP and Teradata. Working together, these companies are generating impressive innovation for their customers.

Three Teradata customers. Xcel Energy, Charming Shoppes and mobilkom Austria, take center stage as well. In Teradata@Work, we learn how Xcel, a U.S. utility company, gained rapid return on investment (ROI) through the power of integrated data. Executives from Charming Shoppes, a U.S. clothing retailer, explain how their long-term technology vision—and relationship with Teradata—empowers them to expand and upgrade their data warehouse to meet changing needs. And in Ask the Experts, Dietmar Trummer, a senior IT architect at mobilkom austria, describes how his team optimized the multi-value compression approach from Teradata to gain more data space to avoid the purchase of additional hardware.

As always, the latest issue offers impressive thought leadership as well as practical applications. While we strive to provide something for everyone, we’re always interested in your feedback, thoughts or suggestions. So check out Teradata Magazine and let us know what you think.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Technology for technology’s sake

rita zimmerman — 11/25/2009

I have been knocking around the IT industry in Australia for a while now and it started to occur to me that maybe we are becoming a bit of a self-perpetuating industry. Are we creating more problems than we are solving? Are we solving problems that are only there because of our ‘dumb’ information technology in the first place? Is there a weird conspiracy acting out some sort of big brother role looking after us all?

DR - If there’s a disaster just deal with it at the time - huh? Maybe you need some contingency but do we need to get hung up on it? Shape DR to fit practicalities.
IT Security - boring!! I know we need it but has it gone too far?
Clustering - why bother? Doesn’t that just create more things to manage to get to the same outcome?
Operating System emulators - why do we have multiple operating systems anyway?

I was recently doing some work at a customer of ours who used a competing (cheaper) database technology to Teradata to implement a data mart/BI solution they used four database servers and two file/application servers to store different information for different parts of the single application. One of the servers stored the raw data for odd calendar days and one of the servers stored it for even calendar days - how convoluted!!

If you take a look at the wider community, technology is taking up our mind-space and time where maybe we could avoid it:

Laptop raisers - why don’t laptops have raisers in them? Why do I have to carry a separate one around?
Annoying SMS security messages from your Internet Banking System? Wasn’t Internet Banking meant to make banking more convenient?
Windows 7 - enough said.
Chafing powder - lose the undies or bra - there’s a better solution. Only in New Zealand would you see an ad for this stuff.
Thousands of different electronic plugs and cables - why can’t we have one type of cable and one type of plug? USB is faster than FireWire - woooooohhh!

What am I trying to get at? Just a bit of advice: think twice about technology decisions. Is the solution adding value or is it solving a short-term problem for long-term pain? Is it just a toy that will create a legacy you can’t get rid of? Make the decision wisely and analytically.

In the Data Warehouse solution space, think about self-management, seamless integration and simplicity of architecture. Think carefully about the future because Data Warehouses grow and change more rapidly than any other IT application - if they don’t then there might be something wrong. Be careful to create a simple asset that can grow and roll with the punches - many will touch it and value it if you set it up right. Try not to create a monster if you can avoid it.

Try and think of a few examples of technology gone wrong. You’ll probably find, like me, that it’s not hard to find them - what are we doing about fixing them?

Greg Taranto

Cruiser and PhoTable: Limited by your imagination

David Placke — 11/23/2009

Last week I was asked to predict what I think will happen in the IT marketplace in 2010. I think next year will deliver more robustness in some areas, experimenting with new ideas but not in a production sense in others, while continuing to maintaining a tight reign on budgets. In other words, the same incremental journey we undertake to develop “industrial strength” mission critical applications. The areas of focus are gradually changing as specific solutions and technologies become mainstream. Some will be leaders and many will be followers.

However, the most exciting aspect of being part of the IT industry (long term) has been the rate at which change and innovation has occurred, and all the wonderful new things we get to learn on the way. What captures my imagination are the new opportunities that emerge for the deployment of technology in our life (not just the workplace). As I mentioned in my last blog, I was excited when we were able to start a computer by pushing a button. It saved time. Many of the early advanced were enhancing speed and complexity of programs and were applied to basic processes.

Today, technology is truly the enabler and our imagination is the constrainer of its use. Research and the amazing talent that quietly works away at truly creative activity is the cornerstone of the IT future. The other day I was reading “Cruiser and PhoTable” the PhD thesis undertaken by a friend of mine Dr Trent Apted (yes he got his doctorate).

The full title of the thesis is “Cruiser and PhoTable: Exploring TabletopUser Interface Software for Digital Photograph Sharing and Story Capture” which brings together three pieces of technology and blends them into a social network construct. All four ideas were not even on the radar when I started in IT. Think about it – tabletop interfaces, digital photos, voice recognition and social networking.

A portion of his abstract gives an insight into the “enabling” opportunities the research offers:

This thesis presents PhoTable, a social interface allowing people to effectively share, and tell stories about, recently taken, unsorted digital photographs around an interactive tabletop. In addition, the computer-arbitrated digital interaction allows PhoTable to capture the stories told, and associate them as audio metadata to the appropriate photographs. By leveraging the tabletop interface and providing a highly usable and natural interaction we can enable users to become immersed in their social interaction, telling stories about their photographs, and allow the computer interaction to occur as a side-effect of the social interaction. Correlating the computer interaction with the corresponding audio allows PhoTable to annotate an automatically created digital photo album with audible stories, which may then be archived. These stories remain useful for future sharing – both collocated sharing and remote (e.g. via the Internet) – and also provide a personal memento both of the event depicted in the photograph (e.g. as a reminder) and of the enjoyable photo sharing experience at the tabletop.

Please note that Trent’s full thesis is available on-line at The Sydney eScholarship Repository.

I love this sort of thinking, as it also fires my imagination to think of other “applications” the concept could support. Because my current work has a focus on business intelligence and data warehousing solutions, I thought, why not replace the digital photos with BI reports? They are digital objects too. They could even be updated dynamically by the underlying application if the people sharing analytic insight wanted to undertake the “what if” scenarios (which they can do now at the computer) and the “stories” captured become the report analysis (or meeting notes). I expect this sort of “meeting” could be highly productive.

And so might many other business applications of a technology enabler designed for recreation. Just as recreation activities have conversely been the beneficiary. Research in one area always leads to development in many others. Who would have thought of microchips in cars? Getting the fuel consumption, distance to empty and the outside temperature while I’m driving – not just my speed, fuel levels, torque and air con (up-market cars) seem passé these days but not in the 1980s. Where will Trent’s research contribution take us?

Christine Page-Hanify

Let Me Share a Secret With You

Darryl McDonald — 11/23/2009

As I was out shopping with my son this weekend, I realized there are still a lot of opportunities for retailers around consumer privacy. You know, we can be fickle about our privacy. Sometimes,

we want all our dealings and information to be private, and then sometimes, we don't. For example, we expect retailers to know our preferences regardless of whether we are in the store or online. We get irritated when we receive a sales promotion to buy something we just bought from the very same retailer.

Where privacy becomes an issue is when others acknowledge that they know what we bought and we weren't expecting or seeking that acknowledgement. We hope our neighbors and even strangers will admire the new car we just bought, but we hope no one will mention it when we buy certain personal care items from the pharmacy.

The more personal information we voluntarily share, such as by making purchases on a retailer’s website via credit card, the greater our expectation that the retailer knows information about us and acknowledges it, or at least doesn’t demonstrate complete ignorance of our buying preferences!

The opportunity for retailers is in exploiting those occasions to individually recognize people when we would welcome it. And technology can help. Traditional CRM programs can customize messages based on known activity, for instance by suggesting a next-best offer in an up-sell or cross-sell situation or allowing call center operators to acknowledge past service issues. Web analytics tools also provide a view of online customer behavior. But none of these tools can cross-reference all the various ways consumers interact with a company. This is where detailed data mining of integrated information comes in.

In the weeks ahead, you’re going to be hearing more from Teradata about how we are helping leading retailers tie all that information together in ways that respect consumers’ desire for privacy, while enabling retailers, media companies and travel services, just to name a few, to give consumers the recognition they expect and welcome.

Darryl

Gartner IT Symposium

rita zimmerman — 11/24/2009

I was lucky enough this week to get a complimentary pass to the Gartner IT Symposium (thanks Gartner!) where several hundred C-level executives gathered to hear the latest on the state of the IT industry. There were no real surprises in the opening presentation from Gartner, we face many years of slow growth and we will probably never see IT spending return to the peaks we saw in the middle of this decade.

What was fascinating was hearing the new Telstra CEO speak. It was a “Parkinson” talk show style, which is a new format for Gartner, and David Thodey strode onto the stage looking very cool and comfortable, while the Gartner hosts seemed a little nervous.

David kept the message very simple and what he said applies to most businesses in Australia today.

Make sure new ideas or business developments have an ROI. Don’t let technology get ahead of the business value.
Focus on your core competencies. What is your unique expertise and how can you provide customers with a great experience?

These first of these messages was bundled in with the topic of the National Broadband Network. Telstra’s role is still unknown as they work through the regulatory issues, and David believes the timeline is a way off as the design work isn’t completed and there are still unanswered questions on how it will be implemented. Although he supports the concept he believes it is an incredibly difficult project that doesn’t have a great ROI at this point in time.

He is wary of investing in a technology before the business case is clearly defined, and questions how quickly consumers till take on this new technology. Today Telstra has only 5% of home users on 20mbs. On the other hand he points out that the Telstra network traffic is currently doubling every 8 years, and that growth is speeding up. He can also see great opportunities around education and schools and the huge household demand for video.

In illustrating the second key message about focusing on core competencies, David talked about the core of the Telstra business, networks and network services. Telstra will focus on improving customer service via offering network centric services and work side-by-side with IT vendors and systems integrators to deliver solutions to customers.

It was refreshing to hear a straight-forward and focused talk. Even made me start to think about buying some Telstra shares. Do you think David will have success at realising these strategies within Telstra?

Tracy Gumm
Program Manager
http://au.linkedin.com/in/tracygumm

Tipping Points

Jamie Flynn — 11/19/2009

The term Business Analytics is on everyone’s lips. It’s like when you buy a new car, suddenly you see that same car everywhere where previously you never noticed it on the road. That’s how I see business analytics, once the domain of math gurus, it is now talked about by all. Its even being referred to as a tipping point for our customers, something which can dramatically change their businesses.

But what does business analytics mean? Traditionally it meant complex mathematical algorithms, designed to simulate realworld scenarios, and generally visualised as a star trek style dashboard where management can control the business with the click of a mouse.

I have a slightly different view. I think it means the way the whole of the business is run, how all the business units come together to decide on their offers and how they combine strategic and operational level data, with the endgame being predictive modeling and the ability to evaluate what-if scenarios to make the best investments in ever changing markets.

The challenge to reaching this endgame is organisational not technological. How can we be nimble and self directing while, at the same time, being integrated and working with a whole view of the business? We are all frightened of the beaurocracy that can creep in when everything is a matrix, but if we can enable integration whilst keeping complexity at bay there will be powerful competitive advantages.

This is why all our key partners are investing heavily in business analytics. They know if they can help customers solve these issues there is a pot of gold for all involved. IBM GBS recently announced a new global Business Analytics & Optimisation Practice and have also set up Analytic centres in China, Japan and the US . They have 4000 people all dedicated to Business Analytics, helping enable their customers to discover predictive insights and turn them into operational reality.

Accenture and Capgemini are also focusing in on how they can solve this problem for customers. Accenture surveyed the marketplace in the USA and found that two-thirds of large U.S. companies believe they need to improve their analytical capabilities and only half believe they are spending enough on business analytics. “These findings show that business analytics prowess will be a high priority in the boardroom in 2009 and beyond,” said Royce Bell, chief executive officer of Accenture Information Management Services. “While executives understand that companies with enterprise-wide business analytics have an advantage over those still relying on nebulous sources to make decisions, they face institutional challenges to reforming their processes across the board. Leading organizations are moving from a siloed approach to more inclusive information management programs that work across the entire company.”

Soon business analytics will be common and well understood, just as CRM and the internet are today. We will wonder how we ever survived without it. This is great for Teradata as this has been our focus since inception. The challenge for Teradata is to partner effectively with the companies who are focusing on this area. Do you think Teradata can partner to deliver this vision to customers?

Tracy Gumm
Program Manager

http://au.linkedin.com/in/tracygumm

Analytics is Not a Dirty Word

Bill Cooper — 11/17/2009

What seems like a lifetime ago, I was intelligence officer in the Air Force. Beyond creating Snoopy calendars on the mainframe at NASA where my Dad worked, my career in the intelligence community is how I got involved in computer technology and eventually wound up in the IT industry. In the intelligence community, we used computers for the things you would assume that they are used for: that is to find, fix and finish bad guys. We used computers to create databases containing all that we knew (or thought we knew) about installations, communications systems, governments personalities, and weapons systems of our potential adversaries. We used all kinds of methods to find that one vital scrap of information in mountains of data, including building our own technology solutions. But even though we made progress, I always felt like it wasn’t enough.We also used computers to assist with more mundane corporate like functions such as figuring out how to manage to funds appropriated by congress.

As I reflect back on the systems we used, I can only wish that we had the commercial off-the-shelf analytical capabilities that exist today. For example, in Desert Storm, my unit ran out of a particular kind of bomb fin because the ship bringing our re-supply of bomb fins was re-routed to meet some other need. For three days or so, we dropped bombs with another type of fin that made the bombs much less accurate. Dropping bombs with the wrong fins means more missions to accomplish the desired objective and that puts aircrews and airframes at greater risk. It also increases the likelihood that we will hit something that we do not want to hit. Today, logistics systems with state-of-the-art analytics can predict this type of problem and help identify options to avoid similar occurrences.

Later, when I was at the Pentagon, I helped manage the development and deployment of IT systems that supported the intelligence community and the warfighter. Several times a year we would be asked to support congressional testimony, defend new expenditures, live with program budget cuts, etc. Lacking a system to assist us in the analysis of budget changes to our programs, we simply did the best we could to answer questions from the Hill and to manage budget impacts on our assigned programs. What I would have given for the ability to ask complex queries of a database! Unfortunately, DOD still lacks a unified budgeting and forecasting system.

In fact, most federal departments and agencies are in the same situation. As a former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security once told me about DHS, "the department has many financial management and ERP systems, but can't tell you how many employees it has from day-to-day!"

I’ve watched many government agencies balk at the idea of data mining and complex analytics. They are concerned about switching to a new data architecture and the potential risks involved in implementing a new solution or making a change in methodology.

Having been there, I do understand their concerns, but fear of change is what’s holding government agencies back from being able to fully leverage the data that already exists to effect change at the local, regional, state and national levels. Analytics are the key to lowering costs, increasing revenue and streamlining government programs.

In my own government experience and now, looking at it from the other side, I have come to believe that government clients need to think about data the way the world’s top corporations do. Like all federal agencies, these companies already had huge repositories of data that were never analyzed – never used to support decisions, plan strategies or take immediate actions. Once they began to treat that data as a corporate asset, they started to see real results. The best part is that leveraging these mountains of data does not require a "rip and replace" approach. Inserting a data warehousing/data mining or complex analytics capability into a SOA or cloud computing environment can be very low risk and even elegant in its implementation. The potential rewards are immense!

That’s what’s needed in the government sector. We need to view analytics not as a dirty word but as a secret weapon against fraud and other challenges impacting all areas of the government sector.

With the current healthcare discussion around delivering lower cost health care to consumers, data mining can bring results by finding those who are taking advantage of the system. We’ve worked with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to not only recover lost revenue but also to reduce the overall cost of identifying fraud, waste and abuse.

With the economic crisis bringing state governments to their knees, data mining can help quickly recover millions of dollars in uncollected taxes. The State of Missouri, for example, recovered $2.2 million in unpaid taxes in the first 14 days its data mining solution was in place.

Both of these organizations are acting like fiscally responsible corporations. They’re working to connect the dots, uncover trends, determine cause and effect, understand risk factors and ensure compliance.

We need to talk more about how government clients can enable strategic and operational decision making in areas of interest to government clients. How do we approach financial management (think EESA/TARP, ARRA and transparency), Medicare/Medicaid fraud detection, healthcare data management, tax compliance at the state and federal level, logistics and supply chain management? How do we leverage industry best practices in a way that makes sense in government?

I look forward to sharing my thoughts and hearing your feedback on these subjects. And if there’s something you’d like to see me address in a future post, please let me know.

Bill Cooper

Government IT Savings Success - Time to Open the Piggy Bank…Carefully

David Placke — 11/16/2009

Australia's Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner recently heralded the Gershon Review and resultant reforms by Federal Government as a success. A review into the efficiency and effectiveness of IT, Gershon recommended cost reductions, program management rigor and the use of Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products amongst other significant cultural and operational changes. Minister Tanner has confirmed that approximately $430 million of savings have been reaped from Business As Usual (BAU) IT spending in Federal Government. But this is only part of the equation…development, management and delivery of new capability using agile methods and class-leading COTS products are still yet to become pervasive. So what does that mean: a success only in part? Perhaps. What is clear is that it is time to reinvest in the right capabilities.

Gershon identified that in order to change Federal Government ICT, the re-investment of half of all savings harvested would be key in future successes. The estimated ~$215m will be a welcome injection into the ICT economy which has seen a significant pull-back from Federal Government since Gershon's recommendations were tabled in 2008. So for many ICT organisations, 2010/11 is expected to be an exciting year to be working with Australian Federal Government.

Caution is advised, however. Cracking open the piggy bank to spend on home-grown applications using the minds and architectures of the past could be a perilous path. Similarly, COTS products that are untested, ill-proven and bought for the wrong reasons will not go unnoticed. Government needs to take the Gartner Magic Quadrants for each specific IT segment and actively engage the leading organisations, best in class, to take them into the new world. Federal Government agencies have to take the right advice from the right people to build the right capabilities. There will be many ICT organisations looking to ride on any waves made by Federal Government ICT reinvestment in the 2010/11 financial year.

Agencies should be very cautious, particularly in the data warehousing, data integration, business intelligence and analytics market. These are decision-enabling technologies for both strategic and operational arms of the organisation. Gershon was a somewhat innocuous refocusing of Government ICT; a cultural change exercise which gave Government the time it needed to respond. Tanner's announcement reminds us that there are new expectations - build efficient and effective capabilities, responsibly, transparently and defensibly. Spending public monies is indeed a privilege and providing insight into capability-building projects, outcomes and return on investment will be more than just a new trend but a given. Accounting for expenditure and measuring value, not just defending it, will become par for the course. Being able to report on projects mid-stream, make early decisions to "go/no-go" and evaluate project success are again capabilities that will support the project management rigor being demanded off the back of the Gershon Review. If your Government organisation does not have this capability now, it will only be a matter of time before it is politely requested - then required.

Buying, implementing and deploying COTS technologies that enable the wrong decision or do not deliver in a timely fashion will be inexcusable. Gershon brings about a new period of accountability and transparency which is a new Western Democratic mantra from Parliament House through to Whitehall, the Reichstag and the White House. Enabling capabilities to make better decisions in-time resulting in a valued difference empowers governments and public servants to act with confidence and account for decisions with fact. The game for the Federal Government has now changed and those who are best informed and have agile intelligence to support decisions on policy, service delivery and reforms will win the day.

Government agencies that choose partners like Teradata with COTS products, local expertise, a proven government track-record and contracts that can be leveraged for economic efficiencies will be achieving the Gershon vision. I would welcome contact from any government agency that need insights into operations and measurement of strategy; that will be all of you. Building an efficient and effective information capability will stand the Gershon test and enable insights and measurement performance and expenditure of public monies in a new government epoch of transparency.

David Bremstaller

In a flash or a cloudy future

Sandra Worley — 11/16/2009

I was excited to see Gartner’s top 10 strategic technologies for 2010, which the research firm published last month. For anyone interested in IT trends and innovation, it’s a compelling list.

Two of the highlighted technologies caught my eye immediately—cloud computing and flash memory. That’s because both have made news recently among Teradata circles.

On Oct. 19, Teradata announced its new Teradata Enterprise Analytics Cloud, which includes both public and private cloud options. Initial offerings are the Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud, Teradata Express on Amazon EC2 and Teradata Express for VMware Player. For users, public and private clouds provide a flexible, pay-as-you-go service for rapidly building short-term analytic data marts. For a short overview, check out this video.

On the same day, Teradata Labs unveiled the new Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance 4555. It utilizes the flash memory technology of solid state drives for data warehouse workloads. The result is lightning-quick performance that is 150 times faster than conventional hard drives. Because of its tremendous speed, it has been dubbed “BLURR.” According to Scott Gnau, head of development, “… Teradata has combined the flash memory speed with the nearly limitless power of the Teradata Database for the hyper-analytic data warehouse. Businesses will be able to use the instantaneous intelligence to take a commanding lead over their competitors, and then leave them behind in a blur.”

It should come as no surprise that Teradata innovation and strategic technologies are once again intersecting. Look for more on cloud computing and flash memory in upcoming issues of Teradata Magazine.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

“Storage Dreams” and the greatest things since sliced bread!

David Placke — 11/16/2009

Last week I attended the 16th Annual Computer Old-Timers Lunch, and it always provides an opportunity to reflect on the achievements of the Australian IT industry and the industry more broadly. To qualify as an “old-timer” you must have worked with paper tape, punch cards or floppy disks. But even with that qualification I am at least a “second generation” ITer and it is always a privilege to be in the presence of some of our pioneers, “the first generation”.

Australia’s first computer (CSIRAC) and the world’s fourth, was built at the University of Sydney in 1949 and turned off in 1964 (before I even started) and Australia was the world's third nation to enter the digital age. http://www.csiro.au/science/ps4f.html

CSIRAC has also been referred to as “the machine that changed the world”. It “was a supercomputer for its time - revolutionising everything from weather forecasting to banking, and playing the first ever computer music.” http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/csirac/default.htm

Back then, research aspirations focused on finding a way to store the instructions in computer memory along with the data so that the computer could respond to more complex instructions. Until that was achieved operators sat at a separate console and programs were fed into the computer on punched paper tapes. This was their “Storage Dream”.

"If a computer is finding its own way, you can put in branched or conditional instructions - 'If this is negative, do this'," says Thorne. "The computer can actually weave it's way through calculations autonomously. Once it's set up, it can run without intervention. This was the great dream."

By the time I got into the industry, there were still only postgraduate studies in computing none for the undergraduate but instructions could be stored in memory. To test my programs (on a CDC 3200) I would submit two batch jobs of cards a day with my modified program – and if it crashed I got a memory dump to work out what went wrong. This was certainly a big incentive to get your code right!

My “Storage Dream” came from the second machine I worked on, a PDP-8. To get the machine started I had to “key in” the boot instructions and I loaded my programs into the computer via “shoe boxes” of paper tape – but at least they got stored on small magnetic tapes and I didn’t have to do it every time I needed to run the program. Here's a Web link to a video of the booting of a DEC PDP-8 console .[Thanks to David Gesswein of pdp8online.com, who produced the video in 2008.] So for me, when the PDP-11 came out with a push button start I thought this was the “greatest thing since sliced bread”!

Our industry has continued to progress at a rapid rate and today the old problem or “Storage Dream” of bringing data and instructions together as fast as possible continues to drive invention and product enhancements. It came at a cost though – that of data management and storage management overheads. A full time job for many! At least all I had to do was read and write to flat files on tape in a sequential manner. The only overhead was a dual tape read/write for backup/recovery.

Today the “Storage Dream” solution continues to evolve as it solves both the physical means through solid state devices (for now at least) and database management systems to automate the management of data for optimal access and utilisation. For example, in the data warehousing context, Teradata has announced the world’s first solid state data warehouse appliance for hyper-analytics.

While these products are just another step along the “Storage Dream” journey we have all been frustrated by some aspect of our work with computers and each of us will have our “Dream” app. or invention that we claim to be “the greatest thing since sliced bread” – and believe me that was a great invention – so what is your dream app. or invention?

Christine Page-Hanify

*Image Source: www.abc.net.au

In-Database analytics: Teradata and SAS lead in speed by ‘thinking inside the box’

Darryl McDonald — 11/11/2009

Too many companies think slow -- outside the data warehouse box -- when it comes to advanced analytics. Despite the consensus that analytics must be operationalized to reap full value and benefit, most companies are still dealing with excessive data management, movement, redundancy, and complexity - leading to best case tedious processes that take far too much time and cost in today’s environment and worst case to average conclusions leading to average business decisions

Today, it pays to think, move and act fast… really fast, which means thinking inside the box, analyzing analytics models inside the database. On this topic, two press releases issued just days ago from the Teradata-SAS partnership have huge implications for every company that competes on analytics.

With the new releases of Teradata 13 and SAS 9.2, several key SAS procedures can execute in Teradata – further expanding the world’s best value proposition for accelerating queries and delivering maximum analytic performance.
SAS and Teradata continue to build our joint customer base: over 350 engagements in 24 months, and growing. The partnership has a strong lead over other vendors in this space who recently have attempted to make “just as good as claims” about their new in-database capabilities.
The new SAS-Teradata analytic think tank with Elder Research will provide companies with unmatched resources – real, live, cutting edge analytics leaders – to advise on brilliant new approaches and opportunities in data mining. In the Business Analytics Innovation Center, companies will learn how to make new inferences from currently unknown facts and quantify and score underlying critical future trends or patterns in their business that today go unnoticed. The Center will have a visionary lab for pilot programs, analytic workshops, and proofs of concept for prospective customers.

Thinking inside the box: it’s becoming a source of higher intelligence and competitive advantage. But don’t just take my word for it. Read what a leading IT firm has said in the Forrester Research teleconference, In-Database Analytics: Transforming The Data Warehouse Into The New Analytic Application Server, hosted by senior analyst James Kobielus:

"In-database analytics has a strong return on investment and the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is an optimal platform for in-database analytics as a reusable application. In-database analytics cuts costs by allowing data mining specialists to consolidate analytical data marts into the EDW, reduces bandwidth utilization by eliminating the need to move massive analytical data sets to and from EDW, and shortens time to build, execute, deploy, and optimize predictive models by leveraging EDW horsepower."

James’ words, not mine – but I couldn’t have said it better. The point: when your business needs high intelligence delivered at the speed of light, it’s time to start thinking inside the box.

Darryl McDonald

A traditional approach to risk management

David Placke — 11/10/2009

There is more news indicating that the world economy is recovering. Governments and experts are worried, though, that a loan shortage might choke the fledgling growth that we are seeing. It seems that it’s not so much the fact that many people are poorer than they thought they were two years ago that is holding us back. It’s lost confidence that keeps aggravating and prolonging this recession. Especially small and medium-sized firms find it hard to get the funds they need to finance their operations.

News reaches us from Italy that there is a solution to this problem. Rather than subjecting each and every customer to the risk rating process, Credito Emiliano, a regional bank in Northern Italy, simply accepts a fairly durable commodity as collateral: parmesan cheese. According to Bloomberg, Credito Emiliano keeps cheese worth about 132 million Euros in its climate-controlled “vaults” – a considerable sum. For the producers, that’s very convenient. They can borrow money to make their cheese and pay back the loan up to two years later – which is about the time it needs to mature. For the bank, there is very little risk: in case of a default, it can simply sell the precious parmesan. The arrangement, by the way, isn’t new. Credito Emiliano has been following this practice for decades and deals involving credit and cheese have been struck since the Middle Ages.

So here is one line of business that has no credit problems amid the recession. It’s obvious, though, that this solution wouldn’t work for others. In fact, Credito Emiliano has given up on similar arrangements for ham and olive oil, because these goods are stolen too easily. Parmesan wheels, on the other hand, have serial numbers and can be identified with no trouble. But the most important factor that makes this arrangement so exceptional is probably that the bank actually controls the collateral and knows pretty well in advance how much it will be worth if it should have to sell it. In most cases, banks cannot be so sure about this, and rating the borrower’s assets is usually a very complex exercise. This is not only true for derivative-buying, short-term debtors in the financial markets but also for small businesses and home-owning consumers. The value of parmesan has been quite stable in comparison to house prices in many countries.

Confidence is based on past experiences and sound assumptions about the future. The more accurate these assumptions are and the more reliably credit risks are rated, the more often banks will grant loans again. This is why many actors in the financial sector are making huge efforts and investments to refine their risk management. Because, unfortunately, things cannot always be as easily resolved as in the parmesan business.

Simon Doherty

Use of Technology - My thought process on this one is a bit left field I know but…

rita zimmerman — 11/24/2009

After Alec’s last blog post there’s a tenuous link to mine - Andre Mendes was CIO of Special Olympics International. I was playing badminton in the World Masters Games (The “Oldies Olympics”) in Sydney last month and I shattered one of my badminton rackets. I am now down to my last one of 5 I bought in the UK about 8years ago. So I need to get replacements. But guess what, racket technology has so moved on just in that short time and I can’t get anything like the same balance any more! They feel even lighter now and totally weird. It will take me a long time to get used to the new ones!

So it started me thinking about technology and how it’s used both in sport and commercially. I have been playing badminton for 40+ years, so that gives you some idea of my age and you can imagine that I have seen big technology changes. At the Masters Games there was a 101 year old woman competing in athletics and she would have seen huge changes in technology in her lifetime.

I was an IBM programmer back in the “old days” and the first commercial system I worked on was an IBM 360/30 that first shipped in 1965 with 64KB of memory with 60MB of disk storage

and programs uploaded & compiled via punch card!

At the Teradata Partners Conference in Washington last month there was an announcement regarding an Extreme Performance Appliance based entirely on solid state disk drives and can scale to 200TB!

Now if everyone has access to the same technology where’s the advantage? For example Rafael Nadal has his strengths over other players but he leverages the racket technology to gain further advantage. In sport, technology is normally constrained by rules and regulations and they constantly change to “manage” that change in technology, e.g. F1 racing. However commercial application of technology doesn’t have those rules, or does it? It’s not rules or regulations against the technology, just the application of that technology in certain ways, privacy etc. So the technology isn’t the differentiator, it’s how it’s used and it shouldn’t restrict capability or be a limiting factor.

John Street

A Mouse With His Head In The Clouds - Can Cloud Computing Help the Studios Help Themselves?

Colleen Quinn — 11/11/2009

I woke-up a couple of weeks ago to earth-shattering news. Everything I thought, knew, endorsed about the pace of change in Media & Entertainment was being rattled. Yes, the studios were becoming agents of digital change. After being dragged, kicking and screaming for the past decade, the studio heads themselves were doing more than acknowledging the need to embrace “multi-platform” delivery. Incredibly, they were looking to pioneer it.

Don’t tell my friends at Home Entertainment divisions across this fair city, but the DVD business is something of a downer. Sure, the discs will be around for years to come, but, hey, my mother still buys music cassettes, and that doesn’t make it a viable business model.

Disney has caught on.
After what seemed like years of internal industry rumblings about “cyber-lockers” and “Keychests,” Disney announced plans to launch their own Keychest initiative by Q3 of 2010. Even more shocking, they acknowledged the decision would not make them any money—repeat: not make money—for at least 5 years. And, they were determined to move-on in the face of this.

I’ve blogged about the Keychest concept before. A “keychest” allows a consumer of content—you—to buy a license to consume (read: watch) a piece of content across multiple channels for a single price. So, you get your file download, mobile and VOD versions for a single unit cost. It’s revolutionary, and what customers are demanding.

As one of my favorite past- bosses—and one of the industry’s most respected thinkers—likes to say, “The Devil is in the Details.” While the keychest model still needs to evolve, there’s no question that the technical, business and philosophical hurdles are significant. But, we’ve come a long way already.

I’ve been at the “digital content” thing a long time. My first venture in the space began in 1998, when the world connected to the internet via 56K dial-up modems, if anything at all. My little company’s vision: to deliver original and syndicated children’s content online, monetized through e-commerce-based sales of licensed merchandise. Sounds like a semi-viable business idea today. We were a bit, um, early then. Thank goodness, this was the height of the dot-com boom, and little else mattered, except that we had cool office space South-of-Market, and used saw-horses for desks. We were early, too, on more than just the technology front—at that time, major studios and content owners didn’t think/care/believe that the distribution of content online would entice consumers.

More recently, in my last life prior to joining Teradata, I oversaw digital media content management and distribution for a major company, servicing almost all of the major studios (from onesie/twosie encodes to petabytes of data in the form of thousands titles under digital storage) looking to engage in the brave new media world. I joined that company seven years ago and we were still early. Over time, infrastructure massively improved, encoding and transcoding technologies evolved, storage became cheap-ish, and Steve Jobs hopped in the picture. Still, I remember not too long ago trying to explain to Studio execs why they should consider delivery to mobile.

Waning businesses can make funny things happen. Here we are now, and another perfect storm is forcing the industry to shift, despite its conservative leanings. Plummeting DVD sales, entitled consumers (like me), open-minded leadership and broad adoption of a not-so-new technology concepts are the catalysts.

What’s the not-so-new concept marvel? The Cloud. Technologists around the globe are enamored with the idea of a nebulous, universally accessible content and data store. Widespread adoption of and comfort with notions of cloud computing, for everything from storage to application processing, is making frightening change more palatable and achievable for many industries. Company’s with predominant on-site data and/or storage business models—like Teradata, even—are delivering cloud-based offers and services. And, for lots of companies—or, more accurately, for specific business within those companies—a cloud-based model makes sense.

Whatever is driving the change, it’s about time for the Studios start leading the charge. Fulfilling the Keychest’s promise is more than any single entity can do alone. A network of partners—from content owners, preparers, packagers, delivery networks, security services—will need to engage as a finely tuned machine. I admire the Mouse for taking this on. Disney’s always been a purveyor of fantasy. Here’s to the Keychest as a revolutionary reality!

Colleen Quinn

This just in

Sandra Worley — 11/9/2009

At Teradata Magazine Online we’re constantly seeking to offer readers new and informative content, above and beyond what they find in the print edition. In recent months, we’ve begun adding online exclusives to the Web site, giving people another reason to return to the site after the initial publication of each issue. Last month’s online articles included a feature about marketing performance management (MPM) and an article about the oil and gas industry.

In “Tools of the trade,” Mark Jeffery expounds upon the findings of a study on MPM, conducted by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. The director of technology initiatives and senior lecturer at the school’s Center for Research and Innovation, Jeffery explains that many organizations lack a formal, systematic process to manage marketing campaigns and aren’t fully taking advantage of supporting technologies. But for those who have, combining MPM best practices and technology have realized a direct, positive impact on corporate performance. He goes on to explain these best practices and the benefits seen by leading-edge companies.

“In uniform” explores how the oil and gas industry established a standard data infrastructure to optimize the construction, operation and maintenance of vast pipeline systems. The article, written by Dr. Vadim Izhevskiy, Teradata solutions sales director for oil and gas, examines industry challenges that “necessitated an integrated spatial data infrastructure capable of more effectively acquiring, processing, storing and leveraging the spatial data from oil and gas production and transportation facilities. Such integrated data sets or databases enable optimum management of the pipeline companies’ assets, as well as the development and integrity of the pipeline systems.”

We hope these articles will whet your appetites in advance of the next issue of Teradata Magazine, which goes live and arrives in mailboxes later this month.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Yes, we are all different!

David Placke — 11/6/2009

I’ve been pretty quiet lately on Twitter and haven’t written a blog for a while. While there are many others who have formed the habit of fitting these activities in with their (I’m sure) overly busy schedules, my excuse/reason is that we have just been through the very pointy end of winning a major new customer.

The good news is that we have come through with the right result (more to come on that later when we have something to announce). I’ve been through this process a couple of times, and it is “all consuming” (even dreams end up about the sales process), hence my silence.

Unfortunately the process didn’t conclude in time to allow us to get our new customer to Teradata Partners. I really wanted to get there to provide that sense of confidence in their decision that only another customer can provide, and there is no better place than Partners to talk to customers. I also wanted to personally thank the many of my colleagues and account teams that helped us win the deal.

One of the many write-ups that came out of Partners came from Dr. Mark Whitehorn mulling over continuing speculation of an SAP acquisition of Teradata. He articulates four factors that any potential acquirer would need to make sure they understood in evaluating Teradata:

Teradata has only just become independent
The customers are unusual
The company culture is different
The people are different

The key summary point for me is this:

Teradata is genuinely different from most of the other BI companies -- it has a very unusual set of customers, a very unusual working/research relationship with them, a very different management ethos and very different staff. It is these differences that make it what it is and also make it successful.

The reason this resonates with me is because it is the key reason why we won our new account.
I’ve been at (or around) Teradata now since 1994. It really wasn’t until I went to my first Partners conference in 1996 that “I got it”. Since then, being part of the Teradata culture really has meant being able to tap into those points that Dr. Whitehorn calls out. In the sales campaign we had conference calls with the Teradata executive and many conference calls with accounts and account teams in Asia, Europe and America. Everyone is keen to contribute whatever they can to help grow Teradata.

And that’s what makes writing the “Thank You” email so enjoyable.

And already this week we are putting back in to help an account team in Europe.

Sean Kain

Am I a Dinosaur already?

David Placke — 11/11/2009

Last month I attended the 2009 CIO Executive summit in Sydney. There were a number of interesting and challenging presentations including the closing keynote by Andre Mendes, Global CIO of Special Olympics International.

Andre talked about a wide variety of topics and subjects from Genomics to Immortality, some of it quite challenging and all of it interesting and thought provoking. He also used a personal example of how he went from a young, determined and ambitious 24 year old to a 37 year old ‘dinosaur’ who suddenly started looking at the ideas from the 24 year olds in his team with a ‘that won’t work’ attitude.

I am now of that certain age and find myself being a bit grumpy about Cloud computing, something that naturally got a mention in Andres presentation. I don’t want to be a dinosaur - I genuinely believe the cloud has the potential to be disruptive and game changing and Teradata is already making moves into our cloud offer with Amazon EC2 but I have a couple of issues at the moment with some of the positioning around the cloud.

First security. I am getting increasingly concerned at the soundbite stating that security of data is the number one issue to consider around Data Warehousing in the cloud. Second, I don’t think this is the ‘number one reason for discounting the cloud for Data Warehousing or Analytics. If it’s yours then you probably aren’t really considering a proper Data Warehouse or real Business Analytics.

That security soundbite makes it sound as though the technology is not capable of the required security. I’m happy to stand up and say that Teradata can be used in a cloud environment and the data in the Teradata database can be secured from unauthorised access. Indeed our customers regularly use their internal clouds and secure data between business units and departments. Certainly we are more than up to the task of protecting any data and can be further encrypted using the capabilities that our partnership with Protegrity enables.

This is not the barrier that prevents organisations from moving into the cloud. The security worry is not a technical one, it’s a legal one. The small print of many cloud providers has to enable them to give up your data if they are mandated to by an authority that could be in a country that you were unaware your data had entered. I think this legal issue is the ‘security concern’. It’s important but not the number one issue.

On the second point I recall the numerous ‘lessons learned on outsourcing’ presentations I have attended in the last 5 years which all indicated that commodity business process is ripe for outsource but that IP and competitive differentiators should be guarded carefully. A Data Warehouse used effectively for actionable and operational business process carries both IP and requires strong service level agreements, neither of which put it in the ‘ripe for outsourcing’ category, nor therefore first in line for movement to the cloud. IP and service level guarantees are, in my opinion more important considerations for Business Analytcs in the cloud.

When we talk about the 5 stages of Data Warehousing, we talk about a chasm between stages 1 and 2 and then between 3 and 4. This is a cultural and all too often a technical issue that organisations get into. Whilst organisations can consider some basic reporting as a commodity that could be put into the cloud, they need to be careful that they do not inadvertently trap themselves and make it impossible to move through to value adding Business Analytics and operational intelligence.

In his presentation, Andre Mendes talked about his use of the cloud. In the case of his organisation, there is likely a need for some operational intelligence but the IP conversation is probably less relevant in a not for profit than a commercial business. I think the commercial sector will be watching leading organisations such as his for the lessons learned and best practices in this field.

What is your experience in the cloud – what do you think are the main issues to be addressed?

Alec Gardner

4 conferences, 4 continents, 3 weeks

Paul Barrett — 11/4/2009

My trusty little model t PC gave up the ghost this weekend with a blue screen of death so I am writing this on my MAC that just doesn’t seem to do these things. But I love spending my weekends trying to reconstruct my PC - don’t you?

It has been an exciting few weeks where I got to be surrounded by fascinating, interesting people with incredible insight into the changing online world around us. It reminds me of the days when Skiers and Snowboarders first clashed, but then adopted each other positives to transform the extreme sports world. Online and offline marketers are a few years behind, but when they come together there is going to be an incredible spark of innovation and insight that will transform marketing.

Between the ETIS Conference, eMetrics, CTAM and, of course, Teradata PARTNERS. It has been really cool to see so many ideas presented, audiences engaged and concepts come to fruition. My only regret is that I couldn't be at Webtrends Engage in London. I am sorry I missed Chris Jenkins from Vodafone UK, Zeljka Stojanovic from Total Jobs, Christian Howes from Webtrends and Eduoard Servan-Schreiber speak. Fortunately I got to meet all of them separately outside of the the Engage Conference.

To some extent, I guess I got the virtual Engage experience by speaking at eMetrics with Christian Howes on the demand for integrated online and offline marketing analytics. Christian does a much better job at the describing the analytics rock-october fests in his blog post than I could ever imagine. Leaving only the question “do all Englishmen find pumpkins so fascinating?”. Let’s just say I hope not. By the way, watch this blog for a guest posting by Christian in the coming days.

eMetrics was great having a chance to finally meet Jim Sterne and Eric Peterson. Jim and I have a white paper coming out in the near future about bridging the online and offline gap in your enterprise. Hopefully we can post about it soon. My favorite part of the eMetrics conference was the closing panel discussion with practitioners from a wide ranging set of disciplines. One of the insights coming from that panel was that the challenge to integrate online and offline analysis is more of a people and process challenge than a technology issue. John McKean kicked off that discussion - he is the moderator of The River, a site completely focused on online and offline integration. This is an invitation only site, so Drop John a note and join the conversation.

Teradata PARTNERS was incredible as usual. Teradata customers put on this event and they are always the highlight of the show. It is too bad anybody missed Daniela Calaes from VIVO’s presentation. VIVO is a leading wireless provider in Brazil that has used Teradata to successfully enable multiple strategic business initiatives. VIVO has really used its Teradata investment to drive ROI across the organization.

While at Partners, I had the chance to present with some of the most interesting people working on transforming the marketing space into an integrated, data driven, automated environment. Doug Dorrat from Microstrategy and I did a workshop on new reporting tools for the customer experience. It seems like there is a lot of demand for new tools that bridge this gap between different marketing groups and Doug has some great thought leadership in this area.

On social media, I got the chance to work with a great panel including Sheryl Kingstone from Yankee Group, Christine Baumler from Freddie Mac, John McKean and of course the great James Semenak. Sheryl has been doing some ground breaking work in the convergence of CRM and Social Media and has staked out a clear vision as to how this convergence will transform Social Media into a pervasive marketing technology.

Lastly, our session on real time marketing “Customer Time is now Real Time” was really fascinating because of the insight that Laura Squier (spelled it right this time, I think) from KXEN and Diane Strahan from Nuestar. Diane’s insight into the habits of Generation Y and their mobile phones really framed the challenge that carriers and marketers face in the coming years as customers expect more and more mobility and real time service.

Finally, if you get a chance, check out some of the Podcasts from Partners done by the BeyeNetwork. Rebecca Bucnis, Malcolm Duckett, Christian Howes, and I got a chance to speak with Claudia Imhoff - which was really a treat. Hopefully you might enjoy some of these as well.

CTAM was cool - by that I mean snowy. It was in my hometown of Denver, unfortunately right in the middle of an early season upslope snow storm that dumped 2 feet of snow at my house. I didn’t get to as much of the conference as I would have liked since I was spending my time shoveling October snow and building snowmen. But I really enjoyed the Walter Kaitz dinner. TJ Holmes was the anchor and he would have been great if he knew he was at CTAM instead of NCTA.

Did you get to any of these conferences? If you did, let me know about your experience, your highlights etc. What did you find fascinating?

Paul Barrett

Thanks for the memories

Sandra Worley — 11/9/2009

It’s been more than a week since PARTNERS concluded, and I’m still coming down from my Teradata buzz. At numerous presentations and informal chats, I learned about the exciting, innovative ways Teradata users are leveraging data. That’s certainly a theme for anyone familiar with Teradata Magazine. But even when I think I’ve heard it all, I learned in one session about a retailer that has developed a formula to predict sales of items down to the hour of the day. As a result, analysts will be able to track items that are selling at an atypical rate or when something is about to become out of stock at one of its stores. They will then be able to alert the store manager before the day’s purchase orders are made. This was just one of many innovations I learned about. As I sift through my copious notes, I find myriad nuggets of these types of ingenious initiatives.

At the same time, I met so many dedicated, brilliant business intelligence (BI) professionals. It was a veritable who’s who of data warehousing’s best and brightest—consultants, thought leaders and industry analysts, as well as Teradata’s customers, partners and associates—too many to name. Many of these luminaries have contributed or plan to contribute to Teradata Magazine, which is exciting. But even more rewarding was the positive feedback I received regarding the magazine. It’s high praise indeed coming from this group.

Alas, however, this moment in time is over, and all we can do is wait until next year for PARTNERS 2010, which is Oct. 24-28 in San Diego. Or do we?

For those of us who want relive PARTNERS—or those who couldn’t make the event—more options than ever are available to tap into this experience. Event photos can be seen at Flickr.

Several complete sessions can be viewed at Ustream. And short video reports and more are available on YouTube. Bringing together all of these social networking threads—along with blog posts from the conference—is a new interactive online hub, PARTNERS Connect.

So while PARTNERS 2009 may be over, opportunities remain to gain insight from the event, and gear up for 2010.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Supply Chain Facts and Statistics – The opportunities that lie beneath.

David Placke — 11/6/2009

Are you ready to self fund your business improvements?

In my experience I have found that there are simple steps an organisation can take to self fund their ROI on data warehousing and subsequent supply chain improvements. Let’s start with some recently reported facts.

At a recent Supply Chain conference, Smart Conference 2009, a survey was discussed where senior executives had been asked for their top priority supply chain initiatives.

70% highlighted Supply Chain visibility as a key improvement objective
55% rate cost containment / reduction as highly important
60% identify risk management and risk awareness as key initiatives
58% were actively working to adopt demand driven operations eg: produce only to demand rather then try and forecast what people might buy

In fact each of them agreed that their overall goal was to improve customer service as a foundation for customer retention whilst exploring internal and external processes to identify opportunities for cost reduction but equally ensuring that risk is properly managed.

As you might expect, these initiatives don’t materialise unless you have a clear insight into your business. Some call it a single point of truth. Others have likened it to hovering above your business in a helicopter so you can spot every opportunity below you.

It’s not rocket science to recognise that this is where data warehousing plays a central role. Essentially data warehousing brings all your business data into a single repository from where analytics turns everyday data into business insight. It’s the equivalent to that helicopter or better still, it’s a fleet of helicopters because your business insight can be made available to your operations people so that effective decisions can be made where it counts – at the customer facing level. Put another way, everyone becomes a qualified pilot.

So assuming you have identified the supply chain benefits that can be realised, how can your data warehousing initiative be immediately self funding? There are a number of possibilities and it is worthwhile taking a look inside your own business to explore the potential. Here are several existing real world examples that might provide some stimulus.

Oh and before I forget, all of the following can be achieved long before you recognise the benefits flowing from your supply chain improvement!

UNDER THE DESK REPORTING: Often I find situations in organisations where every business unit supplements existing standard reports with ‘under the desk’ spreadsheet analysis and reports - this can be a significant cost just in administration alone. Data warehousing eliminates the additional administrative burden and you can realize an immediate flow of savings to fund the data warehousing project.

REMOVING DATA SILO’S: Unable to obtain a single answer on the performance of your supply chain? If every business function has a separate data store no wonder each set of data is different from the next! Transfer all this information into a single data warehouse and not only get one answer but also save opex by annualising support costs.

INTEGRATING ACQUISITIONS TO DRIVE SYNERGY BENEFITS: Where an organisation has a strong acquisition growth strategy, by transferring acquisition data alongside group data the company can easily compare and identify synergy opportunities.

MONTH END CONSOLIDATION: Many organisations exist as a necessary combination of disparate organisations collectively operating as a group of companies. Whilst this can have significant operational benefits the challenge of month end and year end financial reporting can mean a lot of hard work for the finance team. If all the business data is transferred into a central group data warehouse, then month end accounting can be completed in a matter or 3 or 4 days.

In so many situations gaining a single view across the entire business is the starting point for recognising Supply Chain improvements and managing associated risk. Moreover, such a move sets the foundation for empowering operational managers with business insight to ensure decision making can be affected through every level.

Obviously any such move has to be supported by strong ROI, and that should always be the case. But as you can see there are several other areas where immediate ROI can be wrought, from administration productivity, and removal of data silos, to integration of acquisitions and more efficient month end consolidation.

There are too many examples of easily achieved and immediate ROI to list here – but please contact me if you would to discuss further. In the meantime, I would encourage everyone to follow the experiences outlined above; you will probably be amazed at what opportunities lie under the desk – so to speak.

Do you have any examples you can share?

Download Data Mart Consolidation White Paper

Robert Heaton

*Image Source: BBC News

I Have a Query

David Placke — 10/29/2009

Most of my conversations during the Washington conference last week were about Teradata’s cloud computing offerings and the significance of the new platform, the first all solid state drive (SSD) data warehouse appliance. We thought that people elsewhere might like to get the same additional explanations, so my colleagues found a quiet corner where they could film one of my conversations and produced a brief video from this material.

If you’re interested you can watch me explain why solid state disks make data warehousing so much faster (it all goes down to the von Neumann problem, as I have written before) and elaborate the difference between private clouds and public clouds. I intend to write a longer post about the latter topic soon, but for the time being you might find this video helpful.

Martin Willcox

Recap of Teradata PARTNERS Conference - This year, there’s a lot to love

Rick Loconto — 10/30/2009

The Teradata team was busy with announcements last week at the annual PARTNERS User Group Conference – from the world’s first solid state data warehouse appliance to new Cloud Computing and vertical industry offers. The headlines below give you other highlights of media coverage of the PARTNERS Conference story. Check out the stories below, and go to www.teradata.com for more on the new announcements.

Teradata Kicks Off Annual Partners Conference with New High-Speed Appliance and Cloud Computing Offerings
Teradata: We still rule over Oracle, IBM in analytics:At conference, says it will offer its data warehousing technology for private corporate cloud
Teradata Labs Chief Downplays Database Machines From Oracle, HP, Netezza:Teradata R&D boss Scott Gnau dismisses competitors
Teradata announcements target public, private clouds
Teradata unveils SSD Blurr appliance
Data warehousing specialist promises cloud flexibility (with limits), and (oh by the way) solid-state hard drive speed
Teradata Bolsters CRM Solution

Since PARTNERS 2009 took place in Washington, D.C., we had government-focused sessions and an event at the National Press Club for government-focused media. Here are a few of the stories:

National Press Club Luncheon: The Role of Technology in Achieving Government Transparency from Teradata on Vimeo.

We ended the week with a great article in Barron’s Magazine. I guess this headline refers to pterodactyl, the flying dinosaur. Actually, the only thing Teradata and that dinosaur have in common is Greek roots for the names. But that’s OK – I loved the Barron’s article. Just read the first couple of paragraphs and you’ll see why:

Sounds Like a Dinosaur, but It’s No Small-Brainer

“Thousands of technology geeks representing some of the biggest companies in the world gathered at a convention center in Washington last week to swap stories, compare notes and make wish lists about their experiences with data warehousing and analytic software applications. Oh, and they had something else in common: they are all clients or partners of Teradata , the undisputed leader in the field of business intelligence. Known as the Partners Conference, the event is the world's biggest confab for data-warehousing and data-mining specialists. Some of Teradata's biggest competitors, including Oracle (ticker: ORCL) and International Business Machines (IBM), ponied up big bucks for the chance to impress the attendees last week -- at the 24th annual meeting of what started as an informal user group of about 25 people.

“In the 30 years since it was incorporated, the result of a collaboration between researchers at CalTech and the technology group at Citibank, Teradata (TDC) has been helping companies gain a competitive edge by analyzing the raw data from their business operations, identifying inefficiencies and providing solutions using super-fast and super-sophisticated software applications.”

If you want to read more about all the announcements we made last week, check out our Conference Newsroom – a lot of good info here on customer wins and partnerships as well.

I’ll share more highlights in another posting, but as you can tell, we had a great event. Look forward to 2010 in San Diego!

Darryl

The World’s Weirdest Group Hug: U2, Big Pharma, Broadband Cable Providers, Youtube & Me!

Colleen Quinn — 10/27/2009

I live in Pasadena, a sunny Southern California city known for hosting the annual New Year’s Day Rose Parade, and a college football Bowl game which follows. I live dangerously close to the Rose Bowl, a massive outdoor stadium which seats 100,000 fans, and hosts the annual game, the local UCLA Bruins, and various other events throughout the year.

In my short decade in Pasadena, residents have become increasingly, shall we say, irritated with loud rock concerts, soccer hooligans and general mayhem resulting from drunken crowds staggering around the Bowl, so it’s not surprising that a recent crack-down in evening events and a strictly enforced noise ordinance have meant that little much fun has happened at the Rose Bowl since the Stones and Pink Floyd raised hell in 1994.

So, imagine how THRILLED I was when I learned back in April that U2—yes, Bono, Edge, Clayton and Mullen—would be gracing a stage just a stone’s throw from my house. I bankrupted myself on tickets, and started the countdown.

All went according to plan until the day of the event, approximately 6 hours prior to show-time. I was listening to the strains of the sound-check from my backyard (trying to explain how “U2” was different from “Me Too” to my three-year-old) when it happened. I became suddenly, unfailingly, painfully ill. All at once. Like being crushed by a truck.

It didn’t matter. I’d waited twenty-odd years, and I was not going to miss this show. So, I staggered to the event. Literally, staggered. I sat on the ground, head between knees, waiting for a queue of 20,000 ticket-holders to snake their way to the entrance. That took over an hour. I shivered as I waited in a concession line for a bottle of water and pretzel, listening as the Black Eyed Peas took the stage. I felt so awful by the time I crawled to my seats, that I clutched the aforementioned pretzel so hard it was reduced back to dough.

I managed to hang in there until U2 took the rocket-ship-shaped stage looking like black specks in the distance—not before announcing what I knew already. This event was being streamed live to 16 nations representing every continent on Youtube.com. We, the mass of humanity in the audience, were instructed to sing-along, look happy, dance “loudly” and show our utter devotion to the band, all in the name of solidarity and world peace. I squeezed my pretzel harder, and remembered my 10Mb/s connection at home. I had my first thought of joining my estimated several-hundred-thousand peers—watching through the assistance of three content-delivery-networks to reduce traffic interruptions—from the comfort of my home.

Without question, the band is a collection of rock icons. They sounded incredible. They looked cool. But, I’m getting ill-er (if that’s a word) by the moment. And, the man next to me is dipping his French-fries in Sriracha “Rooster” Sauce, making matters worse for me all the time. I had to leave… and now.

So, with tears in my eyes, I staggered back home. It’s a lonely walk when your favorite band is playing in your back yard, and you’ve ransomed your child’s college fund for tickets. I made it back to the house, opened the windows and heard “One” wafting clearly through the night sky.

Then, I flipped open the laptop. Audio was delayed a few seconds from what I could hear happening out my window, but I could see—I mean actually see!—Bono leaping around like a man half his age. Then, I launched Twitter, allowing its real-time feed to complement my broadband viewing and backyard lullaby. As wistful as the comments made me feel, I felt like my U2 experience had not only been saved from certain disaster, but was some how richer. I was hearing, seeing, and chatting with friends at the venue from the comfort of my own bed. I wanted to embrace Charter Cable, technology innovators of all kind, and big Pharmaceutical all in the world’s biggest group hug.

Then, I shut off the lights. I think I dozed off to the sounds of “With or Without You” floating through my window. Another case of technology saving the day. Now, it’s time for a visit to the doctor!

Colleen Quinn

Good-bye, Washington!

David Placke — 10/27/2009

The Teradata Partners Conference 2009 is over, and my impression is that I have met a lot of optimistic, and very determined, people. This is no time for enthusiasm, neither in the U.S. nor back home. But the people at this conference generally think they are seeing light at the end of tunnel and are preparing to be ready when more opportunities arise again. It was very inspiring, and shouldn’t I say thank you to our hosts?

The theme of this conference, in my view, was the discrepancy between the abundance and availability of data in many enterprises and government authorities. Knowledge you don’t know you have is wasted. Not putting the small bits together inevitably means you will be missing the big picture. In Washington we have seen enhancements for all the steps that are necessary for data analysis.

The first step is always data integration. And it’s never fully completed. Geospatial data is yet another data type that can be loaded into the data warehouse for analytical purposes. And no doubt there will be more to follow in the future. The second step is to decide what to do with these data. Thanks to the cloud versions introduced this week, business users and developers will have it far easier to make that decision. And they can collaborate via the cloud. The third step is to have the data at your hands when you need them. This is where the new platform, Extreme Performance Appliance 4555 comes in. Its SSD technology speeds it up tremendously, enabling companies, for example, to exploit opportunities even during the briefest interaction with the customer.

Data warehouse is a field that continues to develop fast. There will be Teradata User Group meetings across Europe over the next months and, next spring, our Teradata Universe Conference in Berlin, where we can continue discussing the latest trends. The next Teradata Partners Conference will take place in San Diego – a bit further to the West and very close to Rancho Bernardo with its developers’ centre. See you around, and goodbye from your man in Washington.

Mario Bonardo

Using data to predict the future

Sandra Worley — 10/22/2009

Data is everywhere. This is not news to me, but after attending this, my first PARTNERS conference, I now better understand its relevance. Data is more than simply a customer’s name or number, address or even buying habits. Organizations that use data analytics to their advantage can move past reporting what happened and toward proactively predicting what will or might happen.

During his session “Rethinking BI to Drive Better Decisions,” Gartner’s Garret Herschel explained that most decisions are driven by events—a product’s life cycle, the budget process, etc. The challenge lies in the unplanned events. Instead of dealing with symptoms, he said, organizations should identify the causes of their challenges so they can prevent them in the future.

After listening to Herschel’s presentation, I really began thinking about Teradata customers. What do they use the company’s solutions to enable them to do? Here are some examples based on sessions I attended:

France’s Bouygues Telecom combined disparate databases into a large Teradata enterprise data warehouse (EDW) that is one of the largest in France. The telco did so to reduce costs, improve service levels, share operational data, improve access, become more agile and benefit from operational BI.

Telefonica Chile is part of Telefonica, the largest Spanish telco, which boasts 260 million customers through Europe and Latin America. Telefonica Chile is using Teradata Relationship Manager to reduce customer churn.

The United States Department of Defense’s Defense Logistics Agency and the U.S. Transportation Command deployed a Teradata EDW to modernize aging legacy systems and help the agencies better plan workflows—again through predictive analytics.

STIF, the government organization responsible for public transportation in Paris, implemented its EDW to help reduce the cost of marketing campaigns and centralize information on transportation use and organization routes. Using Oracle Data Integrator as the data hub, a Teradata EDW and IBM Cognos reporting tools, the organization is working to better analyze traffic and identify trends.

After this conference, I may never look at Facebook, my hotel room key or even my doctor’s office in the same way. All three have my data—different parts of it, but it’s data about me nonetheless. I wonder if the next time I stay at this hotel, the room service will be ready with my oatmeal and fresh fruit, predicting that I will place that breakfast order for delivery at 7 a.m. I’ll let you know.

Let us know if you’re doing something cool with your data that we can highlight in Teradata Magazine. We’re always looking for great stories about the ways customers use Teradata technology to improve their organizations.

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

News from Washington

David Placke — 10/21/2009

So, these are the latest news from Washington! (I always wanted to announce this one day.) The most important news story in town, at least in my view, is this: Teradata now supports cloud computing concepts. With three new tools just introduced at the Partners Conference, you can build cloud environments on Teradata, both private and public ones. This provides business users with easy-to-set-up, short-term virtual data marts to do on-the-spot analyses, possibly in response to a certain business situation. Such a capacity will make enterprises more agile.

These are the tools: Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud allows users to create virtual data marts in a Teradata private cloud environment, where they can do analytics in a “sandbox-style”. This flexibility is enabled, among other things, by Teradata Active System Management, which optimizes priorities between experimental analytics and production workloads. The other two cloud tools make Teradata Express, a free developers’ version of Teradata Database, available in VMware and Amazon EC2 environments. The first one enables internal private clouds for developers and IT operation managers, while the latter is meant for the public sphere to support collaborative work from customers around the world.

The idea behind these tools is that we want to give our customers as many choices as possible to leverage the power of Teradata. Obviously, we think an integrated data warehouse is the best solution for many reason, some of our customers might opt for a different kind of architecture. And we strive to deliver for all needs – the same reason why we introduced our platform family.

Geospatial data
The other big news is that a new Teradata solution, Teradata Geospatial, integrates geospatial data into the Teradata Warehouse, making it possible to analyze them there along with other data. Most data (about 80 percent of corporate data) have a location reference – but until now it has been difficult to extract the whole business value from this. The reason is that geospatial solutions have typically been implemented in departmental silos or data marts. And the analysis of such segregated data inevitably creates untimely, imprecise, and inconsistent business intelligence. The Teradata geospatial solution thus reduces complexity and decision latency, because it eliminates specialized geospatial data marts, unnecessary data movement, and system integration.

This will give new analytic power to business analytics. For example, courier services will find it easier to locate and re-route packages to another address if the customer requests so – thus increasing customer satisfaction. Or have you ever got annoyed because of poor phone receptions in certain areas? Well, other people will certainly have had the same problem. Many have changed their provider because of this – but have they told them why? With geospatial data, mobile phone providers can figure out by themselves and do something against further customer attrition. And there are many more examples like this.

Mario Bonardo

Stein tells of doom and hope for the future

Sandra Worley — 10/21/2009

Economist, author and actor Ben Stein, likely most famous for his role in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (remember “Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?”), sees doom and hope simultaneously. Known for his dry delivery, Stein took the stage at PARTNERS today to deliver a keynote address to a packed room.

Stein touched on the decline of education in the United States. A teacher for several years, Stein told the audience he gave up the profession because students didn’t do their homework. As evidence to support his point, he cited a study that says that one-quarter of U.S. high school students are capable of obtaining C’s in college. And then he told of his experience with a reality-type TV show starring models, two of whom he spoke to who didn’t know when World War II was or what language was spoken in London.

This is in contrast with Don Tapscott, who spoke Monday, telling the audience that this generation of students is the smartest despite their use of video games and online learning aids. Putting the two on stage together might be an interesting event.

An economist at heart, Stein says that at the end of the day we have no idea what will help turn things around: “You can watch CNBC all day long, but we don’t know what really works to stimulate the economy.”

Small-business lending is down, another indicator Stein perceives as negative. Couple that with the uncertainty about President Obama’s healthcare plan and the possible nuclear armament of Iran and other “mortal enemies,” and Stein isn’t seeing a bright future.

Where, then, lies hope for this country? Stein sees it in what he calls “real stars.” He’s not talking about the TV and movie stars who make their living in Hollywood. Instead he’s referring to the men and women who daily don body armor and risk their lives for little pay in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

During his frequent trips to Washington, D.C. (the site of this year’s PARTNERS conference), Stein, a resident of Malibu, Calif., frequently stops at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he visits with hospitalized soldiers and their families, which he refers to as the “backbone of the United States of America.”

Of the soldiers, along with police officers, firefighters and teachers, Stein says, “It is in their hearts, in their courage and their sacrifice that salvation lies.”

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

Transparency and accountability in government

Sandra Worley — 10/20/2009

Last fall’s U.S. election cast a spotlight on technology, making it a focal point for politicians as well as the electorate. Data is the enormous story, and its applicability to our everyday lives is examined in Stephen Baker’s book, “The Numerati.” Baker, a senior writer for BusinessWeek, wrote the book after researching a mathematics article for the magazine. He posits that through understanding data, people will better understand themselves.

Some car insurers, for example, are giving drivers the option of installing a “black box” in their cars to monitor driving habits. In exchange for doing so, the drivers receive a discount. Those who want to remain anonymous are going to pay more down the road, according to Baker.

Baker was part of a technology in government panel held at the National Press Club today. Joining him on the panel, which was moderated by Teradata Vice President of Government Affairs Tim Day, were Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst and Stephen Horne, vice president, Master Data Management and Integration Services, Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.

Myriad areas of government could benefit from increased transparency and accountability, according to the panel members. Brobst used healthcare as his example, saying that using the past to predict the future and then making decisions based on the analysis of that data could be used to make healthcare more proactive.

Horne focused on financial reporting issues. The government is what he described as “data rich and information poor.” Scores of reports are generated each year in accordance with government regulations, but they simply sit on shelves. No attempts are made to take that data and use it to solve problems. HR 1242 has been introduced in an attempt to change this, creating a database that could then be analyzed to provide meaningful, actionable information, Horne says.

While individual pieces of data may not mean anything, larger amounts of data from multiple points, once filtered to get to the truth, can lead to major insights, according to Horne.

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

Welcome to the Teradata PARTNERS Conference 2009!

David Placke — 10/19/2009

There we are, on the river Potomac, a few miles downstream from the United States’ political centre. Tomorrow, we will venture right into the heart of the capital – one of its cardiac veins, at least – the National Press Club, for a continuation of the testimony I have mentioned in my last post. In the meantime, the data warehousing community has been assembling here in the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center where most of our sessions will take place. For the moment, I can say little more than that the global community looks a great deal bigger than its EMEA subset. I have promised to shake many hands in this city, and I wasn’t idle at last night’s welcome party.

This morning, our CEO Mike Koehler officially welcomed the attendees and put much emphasis on speed, or rather on timely availability of information. It’s one matter, for example, to know your customer in detail, and another matter to be able to utilize this knowledge while the customer is visiting your website. During this short period, you might want to find out what would be the right offers (or ads) for this customer at this very moment, before the customer leaves your site. To do this, you will have to analyse both the click-through data and the rest of your customer data. This requires real-time capacities that used to be rather expensive. The technical reason for this is that, at some level, hard disk drives are a bottleneck in any data warehouse architecture, as Martin Willcox has elaborated in one of his posts on this blog. Teradata has found a faster way of breaking through this “sonic wall” by utilizing solid state drive (SSD) technology, for our new Extreme Performance Appliance 4555. Unlike hard drives with their electro-mechanical tasks, flash drives don’t produce delays when writing and reading data, making intelligent responses to browsing behaviour much easier to realize than before. It’s a neat innovation that makes the solution to many business problems much more affordable than before.

The rest of today’s agenda is pretty packed with more sessions, media briefings and, tonight, the Partner Impact Awards ceremony. I’ll bring you up to date with some these events tomorrow morning. Which is sometime tomorrow afternoon for you, depending on where you are in the EMEA region.

Mario Bonardo

Blogging from Istanbul

Paul Barrett — 10/19/2009

I just got back from Istanbul where I had the pleasure of participating in the the ETIS Community gathering entitled “Data is King – the Key Asset for Future Telco Business”. This was a really interesting two day conference with Presentation from Deutsche TeleKom, Croatian Telecom, TurkCell, TeliaSonera, Belgacom, CYTA, OTE – and that was just in the BI working group, only one of several sub-groups that met this week. It was one of those conferences where you wish you could be in three rooms at once because there was so much great information shared.

One of the things I liked best was the amount of sharing between the operating companies in different countries. Although everyone was at different levels of maturity there were great ideas to be learned from each other. Even the last slide of the last presentation by Karlis Patjanko from Lattelecom had a key learning about leveraging what users like. His example was that if users like excel, let them use excel in analyzing their business – but you can still invest in data management while giving them tools they like. I am a little prejudice about this because I have been working with Microsoft to create solutions that utilize both Microsoft tools and Teradata in the Contact Center space. I think the future of analysis includes more and better tools at the personal, team and enterprise level that leverage the power of Teradata in ways.

Another great presentation was by Achim Klabunde the Director General for European Commission Information Society and Media. His insight into the Commission’s approach and rationale for it privacy rules was very enlightening. Having just spent 10 days with leading Telecommunications comapanies all over Europe and having heard the entire spectrum of strategies about using customer data, this presentation enable me to understand how these companies can operate so differently under the same set of rules. Achim also did a great job of explaining some of the myths about the EU privacy rules explaining the realty was often different than the expectation.

Iiker Kuruoz, the CIO of Turkcell, welcomed the community to Istanbul and demonstrated the power of location based analysis and the data that could be used in developing marketing strategy and improving the customer experience. Before I left for this european trip I realized that I was going to about 8 countries where I knowing some spanish, french and portuguese would be of no value, so I downloaded a translation app for my iPhone. If that app could have looked at network data and automatically switched to the language I needed that day it would have been so powerful. So I think we are at the early stages of the integration of network information and powering our communications devices.

Overall, this was a great conference and I am looking forward to participating again.

Paul Barrett

Orange passion and innovation

Sandra Worley — 10/19/2009

This is my first PARTNERS conference. I have long known about the passion Teradata employees feel about their company and its products. But I am blown away by customers’ love of all things orange.

At a reception last night, I was chatting with a senior application developer for a company that uses Teradata extensively. Her face positively lit up when she explained how she developed a Web-based dashboard for sales and management use.

Speaking of passion and orange, James Vollmer, chair of the PARTNERS Steering Committee, made quite an entrance at the general session when he drove on stage in an orange sports car adorned with the PARTNERS logo. Vollmer, who professes to be a farm boy, explained how his company, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, reused its existing tools in innovative ways to increase the organization’s agility.

Enterprise’s Automated Rental System was developed to improve customer satisfaction by defining inefficiencies through the analysis of, among other data, how long customers’ cars were in the shop for service. This information is important to insurance companies, repair shops and, of course, Enterprise.

Furthering the innovation theme, Computerworld announced the winners of its Enterprise Intelligence Awards program, which honors best practices in the use of information technology solutions built on Teradata platforms. AT&T received top honors in Customer Intelligence and Management. RBC Financial Group topped the Excellence in BI and Analytics category. The Government and Non-Profit award went to the United States Postal Service. ARC was honored for Industry Innovation. And Australian Pharmaceutical Industries took first in the Integrated View of the Business group.

All of these customers are driving innovation at their companies. Teradata President and CEO Mike Koehler echoed the message of innovation, saying that cutting costs is easy to do, but innovating and growing a business is difficult. As a company, Teradata continues to lead. Koehler’s examples: Teradata 13, Teradata Virtual Storage, the new Solid State Drive Appliance—aptly dubbed “BLURR”—and new Amazon cloud solutions.

How has Teradata helped your company innovate? Which of the new products is your company deploying? We’d love to hear from you.

Evelyn Hoover
Editor-in-Chief
Teradata Magazine

Networking while lending a hand - PARTNERS style

Sandra Worley — 10/18/2009

One of the great things about a conference like PARTNERS is the networking opportunity it provides. Attendees connect throughout the conference in myriad ways—including in and after sessions, during planned networking events and during meals. Other fantastic opportunities, like the Teradata Cares program and the annual golf tournament allow attendees to give back while they make contacts.

Yesterday’s second annual Bike Brigade at PARTNERS 2009 started the conference off on the right note, er, pedal. Approximately 18 Teradata employees, customers and business partners built a total of 35 bikes as part of the Teradata Cares program. The bikes were donated to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington for the club’s Be Great program.

Teradata Cares is also looking for school supply donations as part of the Math Matters campaign, which last year provided supplies to more than 300 children in the Las Vegas community. This year’s Web based program benefits Kits for Kidz, which provides school supplies for underprivileged children in the Washginton, D.C. area. To donate and help Teradata Cares reach its goal of providing supplies for 500 children.

Another way that PARTNERS attendees are making a difference is on the golf course. The annual Driving for Higher Education Golf Tournament was held at National Golf Club at Tantallon and benefited the Hispanic Scholarship Fund. Golfers took to the links at Tantallon, one of the premier golf resorts in the greater Washington, D.C. area.
If you have participated in any of these great programs, let us know why you did it and what you thought of the experience. We’d love to hear from you.

PHOTO CREDIT: Sean Slack, a Teradata employee, makes few final adjustments to a bike for its new owner from the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Washington. They earned their bikes through the club’s Be Great program. The bikes were donated by Teradata Corporation, a DC-area employer.

Join the real movers and shakers in Washington!

Darryl McDonald — 10/20/2009

Here’s a news flash! The epicenter of advanced information technology is moving this weekend from Silicon Valley to the US capital! Intelligence is about to break loose in Washington! Active Enterprise Intelligence, that is – as Teradata’s customers and our solutions and partners take center stage. The Teradata fan base from all over the planet is converging on DC!

On Sunday it officially begins – our 24th annual Teradata PARTNERS User Group Conference & Expo, through Thursday, October 22, 2009, at the Gaylord National Resort and Conference Center in Washington, DC. Most of us know that the conference is organized by Teradata customers, and is the world's largest annual data warehousing and enterprise analytics educational conference and exposition.

The conference theme is “Accelerating Insight” – and every educational session plus the networking opportunities at the event will help attendees better manage a decision-making process that is increasing in velocity and complexity. We’ll have participants from hundreds of organizations around the globe in dozens of industries, showcasing new solutions and best practices from Teradata and a record-breaking number of partners.

The conference has more than 200 sessions – that cover all aspects of active enterprise data warehousing and business intelligence. They’ll be led by Teradata customers, industry analysts, consultants, academics from the Teradata University Network, as well as Teradata’s internal experts.

Mike Koehler, our president and CEO, will speak during the Monday general session as will James Vollmer, our conference host from Enterprise Holdings, followed by Don Tapscott, professor at the University of Toronto, consultant and author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

I like the sound of that because it echoes this fact: COLLABORATION WITH TERADATA CHANGES EVERYTHING! Okay, I haven’t written a book with this title yet – but it could happen. Teradata’s active enterprise intelligence has positively transformed hundreds of organizations, thousands of groups and millions of users – and will keep doing it for many years!

Whether you are a Teradata customer or a Teradata prospect, I hope you are on your way soon to the Teradata PARTNERS Conference. That’s where you’ll learn more about some of the most agile enterprises on the planet, all leveraging Teradata. This experience could just make you a fan, spark your business vision, and have you saying “Teradata changes everything!”

Look forwarding to seeing you at the conference!

Darryl

Our Man in Washington

David Placke — 10/13/2009

This is just a quick note to say that I will be at the Teradata Partners Conference in Washington D.C. next week and, unless I meet you there, I will keep you up to date with some of the latest conference news, gossip and wonders on this blog. Please bear in mind that it’s the world’s largest data warehousing conference that I am talking about, so I can’t promise to give you anything that resembles a complete picture. Instead, I shall try and shake a few of the many hands that there are to shake in that city and generally be your ‘Man in Washington’. As long as you don’t expect me to leave the conference centre for this.

From a European perspective, Washington D.C. may seem to be worlds away, beyond the great pond. American colleagues from the West Coast, though, correctly point out that they aren’t any nearer to the East Coast (in terms of flight time) than, for instance, London. Still, I am especially curious about the American flair and share of this global conference: the technology trends, the potential new partner firms plus the general vibes in the halls when the attention turns to the economic recovery in the US and elsewhere.

I think it has been a smart idea to hold this conference in the U.S. capital considering that the credit crunch has created an exceptionally high awareness of the cost that can result from ill-informed decisions. Powerful legislative watchdogs like the House Committee on Financial Services have become interested in the use of data warehousing both for the general oversight of the financial sector and the U.S. government’s own bail-out scheme TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program). Teradata has recently given expert testimony to the House of Representatives on this matter. And I guess holding the Partners Conference more or less next-door makes it easier to intensify the dialogue with political decision-makers than it would have been in the deserts of Nevada. But then again, maybe this is my European view, exaggerating the importance of space and places in the country of ultimate mobility. We’ll see.

Anyway, the Teradata Partners will begin on Sunday afternoon, and I intend to post my first impressions on the following morning – which will probably be during the afternoon in European time. Then I will inform you what has happened over here while you were sleeping. So you’ll hear from me soon!

Mario Bonardo

The importance of context around your data

David Placke — 11/6/2009

I’m a football addict. I play, I coach and I avidly support Newcastle United in England and Motherwell in Scotland so some would say I’m a tragic, or a masochist. That’s football where you kick a (round) ball with your foot by the way. But I’m not one of those addicts that demands or expects that everyone else know everything about the beautiful game, or I hope I’m not anyway. I did however have to laugh at this one …

A while back a colleague of mine was showing the Google Insights for Search capability to another colleague, explaining to him how you can look at stats around searches, how often terms are searched for and compare search terms against each other. A whole array of data can be garnered about searches including the country or city in which the searchers live.

Note my choice of the term – DATA, not information. Information has context, which is necessary for the full picture. My colleague used a few examples then said “there’s a technology called AJAX [pronounced eh-Jax] that is getting a lot of press at the moment” (I guess that ages this story!) so she typed it in and hit search.

“Wow, there’s a lot of interest in the Netherlands!” she exclaimed, “It’s twice as high as anywhere else”.

So, the Netherlands would be an ideal place to set up a software development business, wouldn’t you think? Even beats India into second place.

Those of you who know football, get the point already. Those who don’t, that’s ok – I’m not the kind of addict that demands or expects that everyone else know everything about the beautiful game! Ajax [pronounced I-axe] is one of the most famous football clubs in the world, based in Amsterdam. At the time they had also just sacked their coach, Danny Blind so the hits were high!. (Danny is actually back as director of football, but only an addict would care about that!)

There are, of course, a number of other “Ajax’s” around but I’m guessing that the people Googling in the Netherlands were more likely searching for football related matters than the mythical character from the Trojan War or the Chicago based record label.

Again note my choice of the term – guessing. I can’t be totally sure, can I?

The Web is just one of the many channels for customer interaction. Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence solution provides a channel to collect this data, but it’s vital to combine data collected from here with data from other channels to give it full context and a complete view of your customer in the way that Teradata customer JD Williams does. That way, when you see something interesting, challenging or insightful, you can be confident of its context, take action on it, and be sure what you are doing is based on good information.

Have a go on Google Trends, and tell me if you find any interesting or amusing results. For example it appears that Sydney is searched more and is therefore more popular, than Melbourne.

Alec Gardner

The Pentagram of Business Travel

Paul Barrett — 10/8/2009

10,000 meters over the north sea going from Heathrow to Koln. I am not actually going to Dusseldorf, but my hotel messed up my wake-up call. Instead of calling at 05:00 they call at 06:50 so I missed my earlier flight. Even though I raced to LHR and to the airline. Of course the airline charge a fee to change – but it was not my fault, it was the hotel’s I try to explain, but that of course is not their problem.

I guess I will sort it out when I get back to the hotel.

But this made me think about the five major players in business travel – Transportation, Hotels, Communications, Financial services and Government and the amount of data that is generated during a typical business trip. Data on bookings is created from websites, phone calls and physical check-in through your bank or credit card, travel agent and airline and possibly your phone company.

Think about this from a Net Promoter Score standpoint – would I recommend my company experiences to someone else?

My phone is a lifeline to my commitments elsewhere, information about where I am going and of course to my family. I am used to full, no cost data, but internationally this is expensive. I constantly look for WiFI locations to get my e-mail and web access. I bought a package for emergency data – today I need to use it. The prices go from <$1 per megabyte to >$5 mb if I go over my plan. I will spend the day checking my usage… No, I would not recommend it – even though the voice service is much better than my home voice service.

How was your trip? The airline might ask. We’ll not so good, I got to my meeting late, it cost more and it was stressful. It was not their fault – but they took advantage of it by charging me fees to change my ticket that far exceeded any costs they may incur. We know they are simply trying to be like banks and charge as much as possible whenever they have you in a difficult situation. So even if the flight is good, I am still not going to be thrilled. Yes, I would recommend them but I am a bit on the fence

How was your stay the hotel might ask? What data will the hotel analyze to see that I am very unhappy with my stay – because of one small mistake on their part that made me 3 hours late and $200 poorer? A perfectly good stay ruined by a simple mistake. How do you find the data that identifies this problem. Will anyone report it? I am going back to this hotel – will they know? I stay at this chain all the time – will I continue to do so? Whether I would recommend this company or not will be decided in a few days.

How has my banking been? Pretty good, pretty good. Except when they turned off my card for the weekend because their computers didn't like that I paid them twice on the same day. That’s right, they shut off my card because I paid them twice. So I didn't have my card for a weekend while I was 5,000 miles from home. But they did explain it, they have worked with me to make important charges went through so right now, I would recommend them. But we will see how I feel when I get back.

Surprisingly, Although I have had to deal with the governments only at customs and on public transportation, they have been great. Few lines, fast service at the borders and no problems. Yes, I would recommend my government interactions. Maybe that says something about the economy these days that governments are doing better customer service while the companies are not. I also says something about setting expectations.

I am probably basing my expectations on my experiences in the US which probably follow the ACSI index to some extent. I also probably have higher expectations some countries and lower in others.

Paul Barrett

When Worlds Collide

Sandra Worley — 10/12/2009

Throughout the year, we each revolve separately in our own little solar systems. But once a year, all the stars in this galaxy called the Teradata PARTNERS User Group align to become one brilliant and powerful display.

Our lives are inexorably entwined through our data warehousing connections and for a few days we’ll draw together at the PARTNERS Conference & Expo to share our collective wisdom and goodwill. We’ll be both pupil and teacher; competitor and friend. This is my destiny. There’s no place I’d rather be.

Teradata Magazine has a lot going on. From casual tweets to formal interviews for articles, we’ll be doing it all. But of course, our primary focus will be on you--to find out what readers want to see most in the publication. We hope to have the opportunity to talk with you there but even if you're not making the trip in person, you can be right in the middle of the action through PARTNERS Connect where you can check out news, tweets, pics and brand new for 2009, you can even catch some of the sessions as live, streaming broadcasts.

I've seen lots of firsts and bests at the Conference over the years. Honestly, I can't say there was a "most memorable" moment. Although there was that time when a customer's story made the interviewer cry... and the sight of my boss's boss face as we pulled into the station after the Hulk ride...

Obviously, the Conference is what YOU make of it. Do you have a favorite memory--one that you think nobody could top?

Sandra Worley
Executive Editor, Teradata Magazine

How Much Is This Flight in Carbon?

David Placke — 10/6/2009

Is there a “carbon dividend” for the weak economy – a reduction in CO2 emissions due to less economic activity? I would really like to know. If you have followed the recent G20 summit, you may have noticed that in spite of the rampant recession the issue of carbon dioxide emissions was still on the agenda, along with international stimulus packages and banking rules. For good reasons. The perils of global warming are still there and, in the future, we will have to pay a great deal more attention to the balance between prosperity and sustainability that we strike. And I, for one, want to be able to do this in an informed way. I want the facts at hand, just as anyone of our business intelligence customers wants his employees to make informed decisions. Maybe we will have this sooner than many people expect.

For there is an interesting discrepancy here: We are used to hearing (from political commentators, after events like the G20) that not enough progress has been made on the climate issue. But what seems to elude these commentators completely is the progress made outside the political sphere, in the private sector. More and more companies, start-ups as well as long-established ones, are discovering that ecologic solutions can be real business. Taking a hands-on approach, they are coming up with more and more workable ideas to measure and reduce their carbon emissions.

Sabre, an American company that offers travel management and services, is an good example for this. Its computer reservation system enables clients such as travel agents to check the availability of flights, railway ticket and hotel beds and, of course, book them online. With all of the necessary data being available in its Teradata Warehouse, Sabre has developed a sophisticated carbon calculator that estimates the total CO2 emission caused by these activities.

Sabre can now extend its service to travel agents by providing additional information that may be relevant to a growing number of eco-sensitive customers, including corporations with a green travelling policy. They will prefer airlines with cleaner aircraft, the most direct flight routes and, if available, generally less energy-intensive means of travel. Such a service will also help these corporations to generate the exact carbon footprint they want to have. And that’s not the end of it: Sabre could make use of its extensive database to find best green practices for a broad variety of clients. As for private travellers: they will be able to make their personal trade-offs between price, speed and climate-friendliness according to their personal preferences. And take satisfaction in their virtual “carbon dividend” if they choose to.

Here in Europe we are also currently working with a number of manufacturing companies to track at a detailed level the carbon footprint of each individual unit produced (materials, transportation, etc) so that can be audited and even exposed to the consumer, proving that Green initiatives are now seen as both good business and social sense by leading companies.

Niall O’Doherty

Speeding Past Milestones

Darryl McDonald — 10/1/2009

The technology industry is constantly changing - delivering a rapid stream of new innovations and products.

It’s been two years since Teradata became an independent company and in that time, we’ve successfully moved through a lot of product cycles, technology goals and company milestones. I hasten to add we have many more goals set for the coming years.

Like what? Here are a few that will be front and center for us.

We’ll continue to bring to customers more powerful analytic database and platform capabilities and drive greater functionality to our product line. We’re also focusing on improving our predictive analysis and real-time intelligence to help customers make the decisions they need move their businesses forward — and make them quickly.

That's why Teradata has cultivated working partnerships with leading innovators in information and services to deliver the robust, cutting-edge technology you need to build world-class, analytic solutions. Our list of partners reads like a who’s who of industry leaders in technology because over the years we’ve taken great care to form alliances with the best. These relationships give us the power to develop robust offerings that strengthen our enterprise data warehouse solutions.

It’s been a fast two years – just one more reminder of how quickly the tech industry continues to move.

A Pole Position in the Mobile Services Market Race?

David Placke — 9/29/2009

It’s easy to get tired of the hype-of-the-year, in that never-ending technological revolution. If you should ever do, just think of what the world talked about fifteen years ago. “Digitalisation of the media” was one of the catch phrases (and many people actually related this mainly to the success of satellite television). Then it was being said that the Internet “will change our habits” and, no doubt, this has turned out to be completely correct in the meantime. You never realize until you meet someone who hasn’t moved along – sometimes it’s your own mother. This is becoming less likely, though, if social network providers are to be believed that their fastest growing member groups is women aged around 55.

This emboldens me to make a daring statement: the evolution of mobile phone services, and its integration with the Internet, will change our habits. In fact – another daring statement – it’s already happening. The only thing I wonder about is why it’s happening so slowly. On the one hand, we can see a lot of things on the supply side going on. New hardware and transmission capabilities enable new gadgets and services, which result in new business models. There is a richness in applications, and their potential has only just begun to get realized. On the other hand, consumers don’t seem to be in a rush to adopt these new services.

So, the future is wide open. It is unclear, though, who is going to “own” these emerging markets. Network operators, content providers, mobile phone producers – all of them have a stake in this race and strive to take the lead. It will be interesting to see who will win. I believe that the really crucial factor will be the ability to popularize those new mobile services in a true mass market. And my private guess is that this puts network operators in the pole position.

Why? Because, for the time being, they know their customers and their habits best. And they have a decade or so of experience in making customized offers on an individual basis. Regarding new mobile services, they will analyze data to answer questions like this: do customers shy away from mobile surfing but make expensive calls to hotlines instead? Would they be better off if they used the web portal? In this case, they might prefer a bespoken applet to a whole package of bandwidth and other services they’d never use. The result? Changing consumer habits.

Now, don’t get me wrong. The race in the mobile services market is not yet decided and network operators aren’t the only ones who have customer insight either. All the players need to try and penetrate this market deeply in the coming years. And I believe that customer analysis – utilizing large data volumes – will prove to make the crucial difference in this.

Paul O'Carroll