Teradata prepares universities for the digital decade

Business intelligence is the key differentiator that will make or break businesses in the near future, Hermann Wimmer, Teradata president EMEA, impressively argued in his welcoming address this morning. He cited eBay as an outstanding example of an analytical company. At the same time, data volumes continue to explode: “Storage has become so affordable, you cannot afford not to use it,” Wimmer said. With abundant data, new opportunities arise. For example, a single car nowadays has 60 processors under its lid that produce a permanent data stream recording component functions. “Imagine an early warning system that alerts you about vehicle system failures after 500 cars have rolled off the line – not 50,000,”he said. There is, in fact, a system like this up and running at one Teradata customer.

Universities struggle to teach BI
While business intelligence is conquering organizations at every level, companies experience difficulties in finding qualified employees who have the skills to make sense of query results. One of the reasons is that students shy away from tough statistics courses and are ill-prepared for rigorous statistical analysis...

Business intelligence is the key differentiator that will make or break businesses in the near future, Hermann Wimmer, Teradata president EMEA, impressively argued in his welcoming address this morning. He cited eBay as an outstanding example of an analytical company. At the same time, data volumes continue to explode: “Storage has become so affordable, you cannot afford not to use it,” Wimmer said. With abundant data, new opportunities arise. For example, a single car nowadays has 60 processors under its lid that produce a permanent data stream recording component functions. “Imagine an early warning system that alerts you about vehicle system failures after 500 cars have rolled off the line – not 50,000,”he said. There is, in fact, a system like this up and running at one Teradata customer.

Universities struggle to teach BI
While business intelligence is conquering organizations at every level, companies experience difficulties in finding qualified employees who have the skills to make sense of query results. One of the reasons is that students shy away from tough statistics courses and are ill-prepared for rigorous statistical analysis as they leave university. Another reason is that universities are under-equipped to teach analysis in a way that reflects the rapid growth of business data. They lack access to larger systems and data sets as well as real-world business problems. This is the result of a survey that was presented at the media briefing earlier today. Teradata is partnering with several universities around the world to provide free access to data warehouses, databases and data sets via Teradata University Network, a web-based portal for faculty and students. Led by academics, it currently has more than 2,300 registered faculty members from over 1,200 universities in 80 countries and thousands of student users.

Teradata – a top strategic IT vendor
Teradata fared well in the uneasy waters of 2009: EMEA revenues grew by 2 percent and earnings-per-share increased by 4 percent last year – a truly strong performance! Teradata is now ranked among the top ten US software companies and, according to a survey by Information Week, among the seven most strategic IT vendors, as Teradata President and CEO Mike Koehler pointed out during today’s media briefing.

Moreover, Teradata revenues continue to grow even at a high level of market penetration as enterprises keep expanding their analytical capabilities to accommodate new types of data, using them for more and more applications. CTO Stephen Brobst said that Teradata has “analytics in the DNA”, thus continuously outpacing the capabilities of the competition.

Thus Teradata continues to develop its customer base across various industries:

• Banque Populaire Group migrated from DB2 to Teradata in 2005. Now the bank has upgraded its Teradata enterprise data warehouse to improve the strategic and operational decision-making capability of its business intelligence environment. The group is currently integrating data from 21 regional retail banks in its central platform, which it will use for customer profitability analysis, sales lead administration, marketing, customer relationship management, risk management, fraud prevention and anti-money laundering analysis.
• Pannon: Hungary’s leading mobile operator has upgraded to Teradata Relationship Manager (TRM) 6.0. The enhanced system optimizes marketing analysis and outreach. It will enable Pannon to pursuit new approaches such as customer lifecycle and inbound marketing.
• Swisscom (Schweiz) AG: Switzerland’s Telco number one is consolidating its business intelligence (BI) data platforms to result in one integrated, centralized data warehouse running on a Teradata platform. This will give the company a comprehensive and detailed view of its customers, products and financial economics, while also reducing operational costs.

Keep checking this blog for more conference news.

Mario Bonardo