Quick update from Teradata to kick off the day focused on Active Enterprise Intelligence. This remains a key theme for Teradata, unsurprising given the focus of Teradata customers on an enterprise data warehouse full of operational data. AEI is about a focus on moving from the back office to the front office – the web, mobile devices etc. This focus is moving from CRM and real-time operations to include telematics, sensors, mobile. This will increase data volumes by 3-5 times and one of the questions is how to balance the use of Hadoop/MapReduce and the data warehouse – what data is interesting, what should be stored. Dashboards are still hot (sadly, actions driven by analytics seem more useful to me) but AEI is helping finance use data more holistically which is good. Some customer examples:
- AT&T used a single Customer Enterprise Data Warehouse to help transform finance people from record keepers to advisers. This same warehouse drives dashboards in 2,200 retail stores to give them information on daily sales. This allows store managers and others (some 30,000 people), for instance, to see which promotions are working locally. And this dashboard does not consume much time or processing power thanks to the underlying Active Data Warehouse infrastructure
- Sabre, who among other things provides technology support to airlines, needed to provide dashboards to the executives at small and medium airlines. These dashboards let executives drill down into operations data, often very real-time information about flights and passengers. It also generates advice as to how to respond to emergencies and monitors company executives to make sure there are no violations of policies (about number of executives on a flight for instance) and alerts corporate travel people.
- Travelocity uses how you use the website to drive personalized offers based on things like origin, previously shopped destinations, travel interests and recent price drops. Teradata supports a personalized offer box on the website with little or no impact on the warehouse.
Mobile is hot, not least because employees are buying their own iPhones and Androids, and companies are figuring out how to use these as access points to Teradata-powered systems. Right now 97% of phones handle SMS, 43% can handle mobilized websites and 18% have apps. So what’s the right choice? Contextualized systems could be the answer, using all the data in a data warehouse to be as prescriptive as possible. Doing this means that even SMS works – you don’t need a lot of screen real-estate or an app. Clearly many companies are also working on mobilizing dashboards for managers who move around and on using geolocation data to improve customer service. With a solid active data warehouse platform you have lots of options. Going forward Teradata will continue to partner with both BI and new vendors focused on mobile coupons/messages and on telematics – “smart everything”.
Overall Teradata sees its customers continuing to focus both on putting more, and more real-time, data into their warehouse and drive that into active, mobile applications.
