I am a big sports fan, and have watched the Vancouver Olympics Games every chance I get. It energizes me to see the amazing athletes and their families get recognition for their years of practice and dedication.
Now, while no one will confuse me with an Olympic athlete, Teradata can indeed claim some similarities, as we regularly are named in prestigious awards. Our most recent recognition was being named as one of InformationWeek’s “10 Most Strategic IT Vendors.” One of the truly great aspects of this award was being called out for the customer focus that we all work so hard to achieve every day.
“Marquee customers,” wrote Editor-in-Chief Rob Preston, “attribute much of their success to the competitive intelligence they mine through their ‘partnership’ (and that’s the word they use most often) with this leading data warehouse and analytics software vendor.”
Our customers are an ever present key element in our success. Gartner cited our relationships with customers in its announcement of the current Data Warehousing Magic Quadrant. Additionally, British journalist Mark Whitehorn captured Teradata’s customer focus in an article he wrote after attending our customer-led user group conference, named PARTNERS. Top Teradata executives, he wrote, “are walking around the conference, talking to their customers. Get on a conference bus to go to the evening’s entertainment and Stephen (CTO Brobst) or Mike Koehler (president and CEO) is likely to get on and sit in any spare seat and talk to the customers who happen to be there. My experience is that this is unheard of in a company with revenues of $1.76 billion (2008).These guys probably don’t have a mission statement that talks about customer engagement; they do it instead. Is this behavior admirable? I think so, but the laudability isn’t really that important. What is important is that the customers love it and, in return, give their loyalty.”
As the Olympics come to a close, the athletes will return to their homes and bask in their achievement. We at Teradata will keep working with our customers for their success. When they win, we win.
