Beyond the Buzz: The Quiet Thunder of Active Data Warehousing

That cicada buzzing sound you hear in the high-tech media around data appliances may lead some to believe that this is where all the IT excitement is. But it’s a distraction from the real excitement. Sure, I know we’ve contributed to that buzz to some degree – with our recent platform family momentum news.

But the real, rules-changing, money-making excitement in the global Teradata customer community continues to be in active enterprise intelligence™ (AEI), especially for frontline business users. It works from a platform we’ve been calling Active Data Warehousing (ADW) for years. It continues to be Something Worth Talking About. Some prefer the term “pervasive BI” or “operational BI.”

Analyst James Kobielus gets it. In one of his reports[1], he wrote: “For the most time-critical decisions, enterprises require ‘really urgent’ analytics.” This is AEI, facilitated by fresh data, in-database analytics, and event triggers that get dramatic business results in real time. Another group that gets it is Judy Davis, Colin White, and Claudia Imhoff, who have a new report: Operational Business Intelligence: The State of the Art.

To cut to the chase, leading edge companies are using AEI to:

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• Personalize customer web pages in real time with the most recent and relevant detailed information a million times a day (Travelocity)
• Manage data from retail point of sale systems at every check stand to track and manage prices, inventory, and customer service in real time (Haggen)
• Capture and integrate web interaction data with information across all other selling channels in real time, to ensure personalized individual customer engagements anywhere, anytime they touch the business (JD Williams)
• Detect business fraud and crime in real time as it is taking place (Paypal)
• Automate claims processing in real time with rules, data mining, and embedded BI – (Highmark)

Database boxes are cool and we get a big share of those, but beyond the buzz is the sound of smart money, investing in active data warehousing – and getting a quiet thunder of applause from IT and analytics players focused on delivering dramatic business value.

–Darryl McDonald

[1] “Really Urgent Analytics: The Sweet Spot for Real-Time Data Warehousing” Forrester Research, August 2008