In the quest to identify and evaluate technology mature enough for a market, as well as the market’s readiness itself, a third party is sometimes necessary to channel discussions among industry and research leaders. Such a liaison can also help align the two groups’ needs by showcasing real-world applications to potential users. daytaOhio, a nonprofit organization based in Dayton, OH, assumes this role in advanced data management and analysis for its professional and academic partners.

Ken Berta, chief marketing officer for daytaOhio, works to bring data warehousing solutions to both the academic world and the IT market.

daytaOhio was established under Ohio’s Third Frontier government program in 2004. Designed to build stronger jobs and businesses in the emerging IT market, daytaOhio serves three primary constituents: Ohio residents, companies based in the state and the university and research sect, according to Ken Berta, chief marketing officer for daytaOhio.

daytaOhio has formed partnerships with 23 businesses and five universities, including Wright State University in Dayton, which houses daytaOhio. The group plans to work with Dr. Amit Sheth, whom Wright State recently hired as the LexisNexis eminent scholar in advanced data management and analysis. In addition, daytaOhio helped establish a master’s program in supply-chain management and logistics at the university.

Operating in an academic environment allows daytaOhio to act as a liaison between advanced researchers and technology industry members. “It’s really a center to bring market insight to researchers and the latest advances in technology to the commercial industry,” Berta says.

As a starting point, daytaOhio’s first major acquisition was a Teradata Warehouse. “We look at the core framework of the acquisition, management, analysis and delivery of any kind of information, and then start to pull that apart and see how we can help forward that technology,” Berta says. “The Teradata platform allows us to add scale, to show how these solutions can be applied to real-world situations in a business environment versus a research environment.”

For example, the daytaOhio team is working with the largest tissue bank in the United States to develop a national tissue database. The bank had several databases with scattered data system-wide, and daytaOhio showed the organization how to run analytics across the solution to make operations more efficient.

daytaOhio also used a Teradata platform to show how a data warehouse could improve registering people for government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. “We can bring fairly immature opportunities to a Teradata platform and scale it up to show how [data management] could work at a much higher level,” Berta says.

Berta expects that by furthering the dialogue between industry and research and displaying its results to potential users, daytaOhio will become a world-class center for data-intensive solution development. “We have a view that the center needs to be self-sustaining, so we look at all our constituents as a point of leverage for us to continue to grow by aligning the capabilities of the center with their needs,” Berta says. “We can actually build these data-intensive capabilities off the Teradata platform.” T

Teradata Magazine-December 2006