As an industry, lenders have lost a lot of credibility in the last couple of years. Mention most any financial services company and your first thought is probably a negative one. But not all are cut of the same cloth, so to speak.

In fact fabric, buttons and needles are just a few of the items purchased with micro-credits extended by Banco Compartamos in Mexico City. Unlike many banks, this one concentrates on low-income entrepreneurs who typically borrow about $500 and pay it off in just 16 weeks.

Small potatoes, right? Wrong. By the end of last year, the number of active clients was up 30% reaching 1.5 million, plus the quarterly loan portfolio and net income numbers had each increased by about 33% making the Banco Compartamos the largest micro-finance organization in Latin America.

How do they do it? With a focus on the little things: clients, community and details. Information from across the organization is collected and analyzed to keep a pulse on customers, financial and seasonal behaviors, profit and loss, credit risk, non-performing loan ratio and more.

This broad view of the enterprise enables the bank to quickly respond to customers’ needs and make timely, incremental adjustments in its business. In turn, the clients and their communities prosper along with Banco Compartamos proving that … little things do add up.

Darryl

By now, many of you have heard that Teradata had its best 2nd quarter ever – another ‘WOW’ performance in an ongoing series of impressive data warehousing ‘World Cup’ quarterly playoffs. I’ve had the World Cup on my mind since going to a fast-paced international soccer game in Atlanta last week - way to go, Manchester!

In Q2, Teradata faced formidable competitors, like always. But we also played a few who were out of their league – call them exhibition matches. It’s a challenging 'sport' – because each new customer prospect is different, with one-of-a-kind requirements. Yet we keep winning – or I might say the Teradata value proposition keeps us winning. Our value prop is a dream team playbook that proves its power under most any economic circumstances. Our Q2 numbers are tangible evidence of that.

Hey, I’d like to attribute all our success to the athletic agility of our team in the field: selling Teradata in a market where rivals make lots of wild, caffeinated claims can be a brutal contact sport. But as good as our folks are, a superior value prop is the key to winning consistently.

They say there’s ‘strength in numbers’ and this is true for Teradata’s Q2. I won’t recap the figures, which you can read on our IR web page. So I’ll hit a few highlights -- that signal Teradata’s ability to put big points on the scoreboard in the future -- as well as build on a great win record.

• The Teradata team is executing well against our growth initiatives. New customer wins for the 1st half of 2010 were at the highest level in 5 years. Some of the great new accounts include: Aviva Canada, the Bank of Okinawa, Frito-Lay, WW Grainger, Maersk, Oklahoma Gas and Electric, Serasa Experian, and Skechers USA. We welcome them all to the Teradata team!
• Our platform family had another good quarter… appliances are now installed in over 125 customers in 20 countries, in just a couple of years.
• Our competitive win rate and product margins are as strong as ever, and our momentum in analytic applications continues.
• Our continued revenue growth in Q2 demonstrates that our investment in R&D, partners, and sales territories are producing results.

So I’m lovin’ it! 2010 has me feeling good. We keep playing at the World Cup level and provide value to our customers, partners and shareholders.

By the way, this video news clip on our Q2 announcement just showed up on Youtube..

Now I just want one more small thing. It’s all I ask: that Atlanta is named the site for the FIFA World Cup™ in 2018 or 2022. Somebody help me with a value proposition for that.

Darryl

What a flurry of articles around the EMC-Greenplum deal. Some tech journalists characterized it as another 'possible threat’ to Teradata; we’ve heard this before …

For years, we have seen this from ‘the usual suspects’ – a new startup or a long-standing tech company attempts to enter the data warehousing space and immediately they compare their wares to Teradata. Well, we’re still here and many of these challengers are now defunct.

Others claim that they are ‘just like Teradata’ or ‘better than Teradata. In spite of all this noise, we continue to lead and grow. We do our best to educate about what is real and what is pure hype, and we offer to help all understand what's actually going on in the marketplace. We choose to focus on the facts – when you're successful, you just don’t need the hype.

Here are a few points that you can clip and save or pin to your cube walls; they might help when you read about another 'competitive threat' in our space, if you will:

1. Why do competitors make claims such as "we're just like Teradata"? Teradata’s reputation is validated by customer references, not marketing hype. Teradata has been competing and winning against all comers for years.
   
2. If a vendor claims “we’re X% faster at a fraction of the cost than the competition” ask them who the competition is, and check if they are comparing current products from both vendors. With our Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Family we’ve competed not only on price but we also provide better performance against all competitors with win rates that are of the envy of the industry. For example we've been beating Oracle for decades and have migrated 100s of Oracle systems to Teradata.
   
3. Teradata also wins because we focus on customer success. Our people wake up every day thinking about how we can help our customers achieve better Return on Investment by using information for competitive advantage. We provide deep industry and technical consultation to help our many customers get the most value possible.
   
4. Be wary of new private technology vendors whose primary value proposition is “low cost” or “cheap." Many of these vendors don’t have sustainable business models and if acquired by a public company where profitability is a requirement, the solution is no longer valid, and the customer is out of luck.

Finally, I'll just mention that we see Greenplum less than five percent of the time in bid situations. Plus, we’ve had some significant and recent replacements of Greenplum including one at SMART Telecom. We also replaced a significant Greenplum installation with our Extreme Data Appliance multi-petabyte system at one of the fast-growing online businesses we support.

So again, please save this and re-read it when competitor claims stretch the limits of reason. There is always a measure of caffeine in those claims, because Teradata keeps our competitors up nights drinking coffee, always trying to figure out how to match up and catch up with us.

Darryl

Over the weekend, I was cleaning up my desktop when I ran across my copy of the February 2010 CMO Survey highlights.

This research was conducted by The Fuqua School of Business at Duke, and it contains some thought-provoking insights particularly around the groundswell of social media.

According to these CMOs, marketing budgets are expected to increase by 5.9% over the next 12 months. However, marketing spending on the Internet will rise by more than double that rate for a whopping 12.2%. These marketers will be busy shifting spend to address this emerging arena. I can feel their headaches coming on now.

With so much focus on Twitter, Facebook, etc., these "revelations" should come as no surprise; nor should the aspect that within just 5 years, 18% of the marketing budget will be consumed by social media.

Clearly we’re on the verge of a culture shift when consumers are wrestling from us control of our marketing voice. Human nature might lead us to fear that change in power and give in to the “inevitable.” But our business acumen should give us confidence to approach the situation with zest and purpose and exploit the knowledge being poured out to create an entirely new era of intelligence. On which side will you be standing when the earth shifts?

Darryl

Graphic courtesy of Teradata Magazine

Whether you call the game football or soccer, the World Cup is an exciting event. After all this is a game in which “using your head” takes on a whole new meaning.

In the interest of learning more about the Cup, I went online. Did you know that out of a total of 76 different nations participating over the years only 7 have emerged as the final winner.

So why do all those “other” teams prepare so hard and billions of people watch them play their hearts out? Because there’s always a chance of beating your competitor on any given day as proven in some of the greatest upsets of all time http://bit.ly/WorldCupUpsets.

The same holds true in business. Competitive advantage isn’t just about being the biggest, strongest or number one pick; it’s about using your head—being agile enough in mind and body to make all the right moves when it counts.

Darryl

When astronomers pointed the Hubble Telescope into an empty part of the night sky in December 1995, they were astonished to discover thousands of new stars and young, distant galaxies never before seen. The lesson from Hubble has meaning for enterprises today. Marketers are now pointing their technology into the dark, empty area of customer behavioral data, and like Hubble, the technology is revealing previously unseen information about customers and connections between customer and enterprise actions.

Nowhere has this deep data analysis been more revealing than in the area of seeing on-line behaviors such as ad clicks, site visits and purchases, search, and response to e-mail campaigns and off-line behaviors such as contact centers, billing, and retail store purchases. In the same way that Hubble changed scientists’ understanding of the universe, this deep and unified view means that companies can finally see customers’ on- and off-line selves as a single customer image. They can see fundamental relationships between marketing campaigns, on-line advertising or other company actions and customer responses.

Uniting the information is the first and very necessary step to building better relationships with customers in ways that improve their satisfaction and loyalty. It’s also the first step to understanding customers’ true value, to aligning company actions to meet customer needs and to making the best use of company resources and inventories. We call the technology Integrated Web Intelligence and you can learn more from teradata.com. Our Industry Experts blog is also a good source of additional information.

Darryl

Living in the south gives us the advantage of being able to be out and about pretty much year-round. Yet, there’s something about knowing winter is over that compels me to get more active again.

So without much thought to conditioning, every spring I try to resume where I left off last fall. And whether it’s in a flurry of yard clean up or a game of one-on-one basketball with my son, I’ll soon end up painfully aware that I am less agile than I remember. Fortunately, the consequence of my dormancy is likely to amount to little more than a bit of frustration and a few strained muscles from which I can bounce back.

For a business, the loss of agility can be much more brutal, even fatal. An organization can’t hibernate through the winter—or a downturn in the marketplace—and expect to catch up when the climate changes. No, being successful means constant and deliberate actions that take advantage of every opportunity to make the next move better and faster than the competition. We call that enterprise agility.

Where is your organization on the agility scale at the moment? The Q2 issue of Teradata Magazine can help you figure that out with a wide variety articles and case studies on progressive companies like InterContinental Hotels, J D Williams and Volvo. And now the magazine can go anywhere you do with your Android, iPad, iPhone or iPod touch!

Darryl