Business intelligence jumps to new level

As surveys reveal increasingly complex decision-making required in ever shorter time scales, massively parallel database developer Teradata has launched what it claims is a breakthrough for business intelligence. The company’s data warehouse, now at v8.0, increases decision-support capabilities by extending it business-wide, with potentially thousands of users able to dip into strategic and operational analyses concurrently from a single window, and introducing facilities to detect events automatically. Teradata’s own annual survey, ahead of its recent user conference, shows “business decision-making in crisis,” with well over half its respondents saying data has doubled or tripled over the year, and that decisions are more complex this year than last. Stephen Brobst, Teradata CTO, says the new system addresses these issues. “Teradata Warehouse 8.0 is a promise fulfilled for companies seeking intelligence that’s only possible by integrating data from historic trends with real-time actions,” he says. It’s about providing active, event- and analysis-driven links to automate not only reports but action across departments and partners. And that’s a significant advance because of the scale of processing required within a single warehouse. Near real-time loading of data, the triggered event, analytical analysis, deployment of the resolution or action, and its integration into the enterprise are all done with a single copy of the data. It means that businesses can concurrently run the traditional data warehouse workload – marketing, financials and planning – alongside big scale operational management. There are also technical enhancements enabling, for example, copies of the data warehouse to be run and synchronised for critical applications where back-up and redundant systems represent inefficient overhead. Al Messerli, formerly 3M’s business intelligence guru, believes this kind of development adds even more power to what’s already an under-sung and very capable technology. “It gives you business data granularity to the atomic level that SAP Business Warehouse, for example, can’t. With a massively parallel database like Teradata driving business intelligence, companies can transform themselves.” Messerli believes that this is the next big step forward for companies that have enterprise applications and need to make a difference – and that Teradata can quickly extend its potential to systems beyond SAP ERP. He even suggests that manufacturing SME should take advantage because of the scale of what a massively parallel database can allow. Referring to his time in 3M, he recalls that the early pilots involved relatively small data sets and numbers of users, but that it was Teradata that enabled its huge successes.