The IT infrastructure of most organizations is a complex web of enterprise applications, databases, data warehouses, Web infrastructure and other critical systems.

That's why the most successful companies have a strategy not only for optimizing each application or system, but also for ensuring that they're leveraging their resources in the best way possible. Regardless of whether an organization takes a best-of-breed software strategy or prefers a limited number of vendors, being successful requires enabling all of these resources to both work together and complement one another.

It's the same with software vendors. In most cases, no single company can deliver the entire range of software that a modern enterprise needs to be effective and efficient. Instead, in many organizations, IT components come from a variety of software vendors.

At Teradata, we've found that many of our customers want choice—they want to select the tool that best solves their problem. While different products may offer similar features or capabilities, organizations may have a preference for one product over another for a variety of reasons—perhaps the code base is compatible or the architecture is in keeping with corporate guidelines. That's why Teradata works with key software partners, including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and SAS, to develop horizontal and vertical solutions that leverage the best capabilities of our products.

We want to give as many options to our customers as possible. To accomplish this goal, we've enabled organizations to leverage and protect their IT investments by providing solutions that make optimal use of key Teradata attributes, such as:

	High-performance and high-availability environments
	Time to value
	Reduced complexity

Teradata offers this all while extending the value of industry-leading solutions with complementary capabilities.

For example, to facilitate planning and scheduling, SAP offers Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), which includes a core component called Demand Planning. This solution often requires vast amounts of non-SAP and point-of-sale (POS) data to be leveraged from different systems that are not accessible by the SAP APO solution. Clearly, customers need a solution that enables daily demand planning, reduced processing time and ad hoc re-planning to correctly target product replenishment, reduce stockouts and eliminate waste.

Working with such customers and SAP, we've released Teradata Supply Chain Accelerator, which integrates the Teradata system with SAP APO and Demand Planning. This solution provides a high-performance and high-availability environment for data staging and transformation, eliminating hours of wait time to analysts, using SAP APO results and enabling the use of atomic POS and transaction data to improve accuracy.

As we move forward, we believe that the best solution unites the needs of our customers, the expertise of our partners and the unique benefits of Teradata. One example of this is the enterprise demand signal repository (DSR) developed for consumer goods companies by Teradata and Relational Solutions. The DSR analyzes POS data to discover patterns in consumer demand, multi-channel inventory sell-through, promotion optimization and product profitability.

Such ongoing solution development is an excellent illustration of what happens when good things come together, but it's just the beginning. Our objective is to work with partners to develop a range of solutions to help you solve business-critical issues in a compelling and efficient way. T

Photography by Gregory Campbell

Teradata Magazine-September 2008