In the early days of business intelligence (BI), people built departmental data marts to answer specific business questions. The siloed approach of data marts can be appealing because they’re small, single-purpose, relatively simplistic, can generate results quickly and can travel under the IT radar screen.

After years of data mart proliferation, however, CIOs now find this approach unsustainable. When you look around and see you’ve got a dozen of these data marts (or more), and each one costs thousands or millions of dollars annually in operational and support costs, you say, “Wow, I’ve got to simplify my infrastructure, consolidate the data and optimize my spending.”

Industry leaders have learned—and demonstrated through their business results—that not only is having an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) in the long-term more cost-effective, but it also is differentiated in terms of the analytics that can be produced.

With companies having gone through this cycle, it is surprising to find that the industry is doing it all over again. In the rush to enhance business results, real-time enterprises are looking to reduce the time to decision. This shift implies faster data loads and messaging combined with automated and timely execution of business decisions. This phenomenon is spurring the creation of a new point solution, sometimes called operational data stores (ODSs). More often than not, they are embedded inside specific decision-making applications.

Companies are turning to these solutions for many of the same reasons they adopted data marts previously. However, I believe that these operational data stores will be in five years what data marts have become—costly and hard to manage. History will repeat itself, and people will realize, “Oh, I should’ve just done it in one place, and it would’ve been much more effective.”

It is with this goal that we at Teradata build our entire integrated technology solution: providing active enterprise intelligence today, where we can extend the EDW by offering the timeliness and service levels required of ODSs all from the same copy of data implemented for strategic decision making. Imagine driving your operational decision-making applications without having to build out more point solutions.

So, come fly with us into the future. Take advantage of a tail wind on costs, manageability and improved decisions made in real time with timely data combined with all of your corporate history and knowledge. T

Scott Gnau is vice president and general manager in research and development at Teradata.

Teradata Magazine-December 2006