News from Washington: Teradata solutions for cloud computing and geospatial data

So, these are the latest news from Washington! (I always wanted to announce this one day.) The most important news story in town, at least in my view, is this: Teradata now supports cloud computing concepts. With three new tools just introduced at the Partners Conference, you can build cloud environments on Teradata, both private and public ones. This provides business users with easy-to-set-up, short-term virtual data marts to do on-the-spot analyses, possibly in response to a certain business situation. Such a capacity will make enterprises more agile.

These are the tools: Teradata Agile Analytics Cloud allows users to create virtual data marts in a Teradata private cloud environment, where they can do analytics in a “sandbox-style.” This flexibility is enabled, among other things, by Teradata Active System Management, which optimizes priorities between experimental analytics and production workloads. The other two cloud tools make Teradata Express, a free developers’ version of Teradata Database, available in VMware and Amazon EC2 environments. The first one enables internal private clouds for developers and IT operation managers, while the latter is meant for the public .. …

The idea behind these tools is that we want to give our customers as many choices as possible to leverage the power of Teradata. Obviously, we think an integrated data warehouse is the best solution for many reason; some of our customers might opt for a different kind of architecture. And we strive to deliver for all needs – the same reason why we introduced our platform family.

Geospatial data
The other big news is that a new Teradata solution, Teradata Geospatial, integrates geospatial data into the Teradata Warehouse, making it possible to analyze them there along with other data. Most data (about 80 percent of corporate data) have a location reference – but until now it has been difficult to extract the whole business value from this. The reason is that geospatial solutions have typically been implemented in departmental silos or data marts. And the analysis of such segregated data inevitably creates untimely, imprecise, and inconsistent business intelligence. The Teradata geospatial solution thus reduces complexity and decision latency, because it eliminates specialized geospatial data marts, unnecessary data movement, and system integration.

This will give new analytic power to business analytics. For example, courier services will find it easier to locate and re-route packages to another address if the customer requests so – thus increasing customer satisfaction. Or have you ever got annoyed because of poor phone receptions in certain areas? Well, other people will certainly have had the same problem. Many have changed their provider because of this – but have they told them why? With geospatial data, mobile phone providers can figure out by themselves and do something against further customer attrition. And there are many more examples like this.

Mario Bonardo