The 2011 Teradata Partners conference is on. We are again this year in sunny San Diego and we shall try and report to you the most important announcements, debates and ideas that we will come across in the next four days. We already had the welcome party, enjoying the Teradata farmer’s market, with Southern California’s rich repertoire of veggie pleasures. Consuming decidedly local food is a global trend, and you wonder how this might complicate retail business even further, where both supply and wastage of fruit and vegetable (you want it ripe, not rotten) has always been one of the trickiest problems. And one of those areas where demand chain intelligence has been especially, well, fruitful.
One thing about this conference that is for sure is that it is somewhat bigger than last year’s Partners – with about 3500 visitors. One reason for the rising number of guests is, of course, down to the considerable growth of the Teradata tribe, both in terms of customers and employees. And the original Teradata crowd – such as developers from the near-by Rancho Bernardo – are joined by new colleagues from Aprimo and Aster Data.
Another reason is assumingly that “Big Data Analytics” is going really big. The underlying analytical technologies have been coming of age rapidly and the adoption phase has started to kick off in various industries, many of which have relied on Teradata for decades, such as retail, telecommunications, finance, the public sector, health care and manufacturing. The opportunities of big data are huge. For example, a study conducted by McKinsey Global Institute estimates that government administrations in Europe “could save more than € 100 billion […] in operational efficiency improvements by using big data.” (The figure does not include opportunities to fight fraud or tax evasion.)
So, no doubt that our time and debates in San Diego will be worthwhile. The freshly announced Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform, which “marries” SQL and MapReduce, is set to be a milestone in the utilization of big data by making their analysis easily accessible to business users for the first time. Let’s see where our guests see its potential for their respective industries. We’ll let you know, right here, on this blog, during the next few days.
Take care!
