The effectiveness of a company's data integration and data analysis tools has long been linked to a company's success. But as the required turnaround time for data analysis shrinks and the amount of data requiring analysis grows, experts advise that how well these tools work together is an important success indicator.

An enterprise that stores its data in one environment and performs analytics in another must often institute a time-consuming replication process to bring those two environments together. Such a process can severely limit the ability to make quick and accurate decisions.

To help organizations meet their needs for integrated solutions, data warehouse leader Teradata and data analysis giant SAS recently joined forces to create tools and techniques aimed at optimizing how their two systems work together to perform their distinct but interlinked functions.

Organizations whose success or failure hinges on accurate and timely decision-making capabilities have the most to gain from integrating their data warehouse and analytics functions. For example, a large insurance company that fields 36,000 phone calls and processes 400,000 claims in a single day estimates that up to 10% of each dollar paid out is for potentially fraudulent claims. Without integrated data and analytics tools, these fraudulent claims can go undetected or may only be uncovered long after hope of recouping the loss has dwindled.

Cabela's gains speed and flexibility through Teradata/SAS integration Contending with data sometimes more than three weeks old and a siloed analytics process, officials at Cabela's, the world's largest direct marketer and a leading specialty retailer, replaced their old data warehouse with a Teradata solution and successfully launched an internal effort to integrate Teradata and SAS functionality. "We're spending a lot less time and energy trying to find out what the truth is," says Dean Wynkoop, manager of data management at Cabela's. "That's a definite advantage." The new Teradata/SAS partnership, he adds, will help Cabela's expand its SAS analytics to other areas of the enterprise. Corey Bergstrom, Cabela's director of market research and analysis, says integration has made a huge difference in the company's ability to make quick strategic decisions. "Our statisticians in the past spent 75 percent of their time just trying to manage data," Bergstrom says. "Now they are spending much less time managing the data and more time analyzing the data. And we have become more flexible in the marketplace. That is just priceless." —L.J.

With integrated tools, however, the company can bring its data close to its analytic functions to more easily find and fight fraud. Integrated tools reduce the need to copy data from one system to another before analyzing it for known fraud indicators, running related queries and flagging potentially fraudulent items. Therefore, a process that once took two to three days now takes seconds to complete.

Such a time savings easily translates into cost savings. Closing the door on even 1% of fraudulent claims per year could spell millions of dollars in savings.

The 'In-Database' difference
With "In-Database" techniques, experts at Teradata and SAS aim to offer an integrated tool set for companies, for which better, timelier analytics is the key to greater profitability and growth. The techniques will ultimately allow SAS users to analyze data in the Teradata Database, reducing the need to extract and move it first.

Bringing data and analysis capabilities closer together can offer myriad benefits to business leaders who want to hone their enterprise's strategic edge, increase workplace efficiency and boost the company's bottom line. Benefits of integration include:

	Reduced data movement requirements and latency issues
	Improved data quality, availability and consistency
	Lower total cost of ownership and administration
	More streamlined business processes
	Greater regulatory compliance through centralized data

Teradata and SAS developers are working together to maximize integration capabilities between the two solutions. Scheduled for release in mid-2008, Phase I of the In-Database initiative includes these milestones:

	Make key SAS procedures database-aware, thereby easing data retrieval
	Push key data formatting and subsetting functions into the Teradata Database via user-defined functions (UDFs)
	Score data in the Teradata Database as UDFs

enlarge

Center of Excellence
To ensure all organizations can maximize the benefit from their Teradata and SAS investments now and in the future, the two companies have established a Center of Excellence (COE) to facilitate optimal ongoing integration of the two environments and eliminate the need for companies to spend valuable time and resources on custom integration.

Additionally, COE analysts are developing integration best practices to help organizations leverage their joint Teradata and SAS capabilities immediately. Included in the best-practice subjects are:

	Optimizing information maps. Provides information on which techniques and approaches make the most sense when running the SAS Enterprise BI Server with a Teradata solution
	Leveraging Teradata load utilities from SAS. Offers guidance on when to use each of the FastExport and FastLoad utilities versus working with the call level interface
	Model deployment to the Teradata Database via predictive model markup language (PMML). Explains how to use Teradata Analytic Data Set Generator and SAS Enterprise Miner to deploy SAS PMML models to the database within the PMML parameters T

PRODUCT SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform: SAS Foundation, SAS Analytics, SAS Business Intelligence, SAS Data Integration and SAS Applications ATTRIBUTES SAS delivers an integrated set of business intelligence (BI) software and services that enables you to not only navigate today's challenges, but also capitalize on tomorrow's opportunities. BENEFITS SAS equips organizations for success by helping them answer more questions, for more people, across more departments, than any other BI software vendor. COMPANY SAS is the leader in BI and predictive analytics software. Founded in 1976; headquartered in Cary, N.C., U.S.A.

Lori Janies writes about business and technology for various publications.

Teradata Magazine-June 2008