Well, our annual Teradata PARTNERS is here, coming just after Teradata marks its one-year anniversary as an independent company. It has been such a great year and I thank all of our customers, partners, employees and friends who have made us so successful. Teradata is all about innovation and as I look at the line-up this year of folks speaking about their Teradata solutions, I am blown away. There are more than 200 sessions that will focus on our customers’ innovative practices, partnership stories, and executive challenges.
I was looking at the line-up of presentations by customers. It will be hard to decide this year. RBC, eBay and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China will give us updates on how their solutions have grown. Retailing leaders like METRO AG, Office Depot and JC Penney and leading manufacturers like Hershey and Freescale Semiconductor will surely draw crowds to learn from these leaders. Make sure you check out the Sabre Holdings, Travelocity and Harrah’s Entertainment sessions as they will highlight how they use Teradata to win against competitors. Other innovators – including AT&T Mobility and Meredith Corporation, WellPoint, Kaiser Permanente, and WebMD – will, I’m sure, have standing room only at their sessions.
I will be particularly interested in hearing Dan Ariely of MIT as he shares with us how people make decisions, the forces that shape decisions and what it all means for business innovation and strategy. And I definitely won’t miss Lance Armstrong’s talk about how to overcome challenges and the work it requires to be great. Can you believe he’s going back to the Tour? Impressive. I hope he’ll tell us more about that decision.
There’ll be a concert by the Goo Goo Dolls, who will no doubt sing their official Olympics song. We’ll build bicycles for donation to kids through the Andre Agassi Boys and Girls Club in Las Vegas. And, as part of our “Math Matters to Teradata” program, we’ll collect math-related school supplies that will also go to deserving kids in the area.
We’ll learn a lot, do some good…and we’ll have some fun, too…hope to see you there!