Teradata Blog Feed

It’s About Time

Sandra Worley — 6/30/2010

For the past four months I’ve been training for Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minn.—logging more than 530 miles. When race day finally came June 19, I crossed the finish line in a respectable but unremarkable 4:22:14. What was notable, however, was that I managed to drop about 45 minutes from last year’s time.

This got me thinking about time and velocity, a common subject in Teradata Magazine. We frequently talk about query times, making operational decisions quickly and speed of deployment. It all boils down to the value of time.

In “Build a better, faster value chain,” for instance, Dave Schrader explains how having real-time data available in an active data warehouse shortens response times and optimizes operations. He cites DirecTV’s ability to make hourly call-type predictions so its National Command Center can react to spikes in calls relating to things like outages, technical problems and weather-related issues.

In situations like that, every second can mean thousands of dollars in incremental revenue. So that means my 45-minute improvement could have literally been worth millions—if only I were a business.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

It’s a numbers game (of two halves)

David Placke — 6/30/2010

The world centre of football is… Zurich! South Africa may be getting all of the attention at the moment, but it is here in Switzerland's largest city that most of the important decisions are made. Zurich is, of course, home to world governing body FIFA and it is here that decisions are taken about how the rules of the game should be enforced, what price broadcasters should pay to secure TV rights to the World Cup – and how that Kings Ransom should then be distributed.

This year’s tournament will probably earn FIFA a record $2B; by comparison, the 2002 tournament earned it only a paltry £636M (or $958M at current exchange rates). The cost to South Africa of staging the 2010 World Cup is estimated at $3.5B; a price that some commentators consider far too great for a country blighted by want on such a large scale to bear; especially as the lucrative – and predictable – marketing rights are FIFA’s to sell, whilst only the unpredictable revenues from local ticket sales are returned to the host nation. FIFA, it should be said, has made a $500M contribution towards the infrastructure costs incurred by South African organizing committee. And it will earn no substantial additional revenues until the 2014 World Cup, despite the fact that it will incur significant costs in organizing less glamorous competitions and in promoting the game at grass-roots across the world between now-and-then.

Rather harder to defend, perhaps, are players’ incomes, which have grown even more spectacularly than has FIFA’s revenues. According to one respected review, the average annual salary of footballers in England's top league broke through the £1m ceiling in 2007, which means that even the journeymen in the current England team now earn near enough the national average annual salary in just one week. England’s World Cup winning team of 1966 were also relatively well-paid - but earned 6 times more than the average annual salary, not 52 times more.

In the last 30 years, meanwhile, processor performance has increased by five million times, whilst storage performance has increased by a factor of only five. This yawning performance gap – bigger even than the gap between the performance of the England team and the expection of the English media and fans - is clearly unsustainable, particular for I/O intensive workloads such as data warehousing. And this is the reason for our excitement about solid-state storage (SSD) technology; as Teradata technology supremo Stephen Brobst has been explaining on our tour of the region, SSD technology improves random I/O performance by two orders of magnitude and will transform the database industry.

Though revolutionary, SSD technology remains more expensive than magnetic storage technology - and that disparity will continue to endure, even if, as Stephen predicts, the cost of SSD technology continues to decrease 40% year-on-year on a compound annual basis. Not only that, but the industry faces an explosion in data volumes.

Total stored data volumes are increasing exponentially. Stephen makes the point that the Petabyte (1015 Bytes) age is already upon us - and that the Zettabyte (1021 Bytes) age is in the line-of-sight. One of the current high-profile drivers of this growth - Web 2.0 and its myriad micro-conversations, mediated by Facebook & Co. – is in fact less important than the revolution in sensor technology and the Tsunami of senor data that will follow. As Stephen says of Social Networking: “in the end, there are only so many monkeys and so many typewriters – but there will be trillions of interconnected sensors.” Those interconnected sensors will re-define the meaning of “detailed data”, as we move from collecting transaction data in the data warehouse to capturing interaction data.

(Stephen, by the way, is an avid social networker himself and is paraphrasing the old adage that given enough monkeys and enough typewriters the Complete Works of Shakespere could be re-produced, not making pejorative judgements about the value of social networks and those that spend their time sharing online! At least I don’t think he is calling me a monkey.)

Teradata was, of course, the first vendor to announce an all solid-state storage data warehouse appliance, an achievement that we are justifiably proud of. But not even in our wildest dreams do we envisage that it will make sense for most of our customers to put most of their data on SSDs. And trust me, my wildest dreams are pretty wild…

That’s not just because solid-state storage is relatively expensive (though it is), and not just because the unit price of magnetic storage also continues to fall (which it does, albeit less spectacularly than the price of solid-state storage). It’s because the Paretto rule also applies to storage access: 80% or more of access requests address 20% or less of the data managed by the average analytical database. It follows that no sane CFO will approve a request to store most or all of an organization’s - exponentially increasing, remember – data on the most expensive, high-performance storage devices. Not when he or she could get roughly the same benefit for 20% of the outlay. And insane CFOs are as rare as England hat tricks at the World Cup (another iPod Shuffle to the first reader who can correctly identify the player who last accomplished this feat and the match and tournament concerned).

All of which is why Teradata’s all solid-state storage appliance is just the beginning of our journey with this technology - and the reason that the ultimate destination is mixed-storage products, with “hot” and “cold” data automatically and transparently migrated between the different storage devices using our industry-leading Teradata Virtual Storage software. The automated migration of data is much more than cool, geeky engineering, by the way - it’s essential to the trick of getting an 80% performance boost for a 20% investment, because today’s “hot data” is yesterday’s old news. That ball will keep on rolling…

Enough of these number games, time for the real thing. England are through to the last 16 of the World Cup – just! – and take on Germany on Sunday, a game I will be watching in the Lufthansa lounge at Frankfurt airport, en route to Madrid. Meat pie, sausage roll – come on England, give us a goal!

Watershed Moments In Internet History: Mark Your Calendars. Google Won.

Colleen Quinn — 6/25/2010

June 23rd 2010. 6/23/10. It’s a real shame the numbers don’t have more of a ring to them. A verdict on the 10th of October (e.g. 10/10/10) might be more resonant. But, even if the date doesn’t roll off the tongue, mark my words: this is a date which will live in infamy for content distributors and content owners everywhere.

This is the day Google won. In a potentially landmark decision (though one with many, many appeals in its future), a federal judge in New York threw out Viacom’s $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit against Google’s YouTube.

It’s a long story—and one made-for-Hollywood with its subterfuge and plot twists. But, in short, Viacom sued Youtube for boat loads of money for copyright infringement-- that is, knowingly posting copyrighted materials to the site, without financial remuneration to the rights holders. In one of the truly major tests of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the judge found that Youtube (nee Google) were not liable. Title II of the DMCA generally protects a Web site from liability for copyrighted material uploaded by its users as long as the operator of the site takes down the material when notified by its rightful owner that it was uploaded without permission. So, in the judge’s estimation, Youtube met this test.

But, here’s the good stuff: the case evidence dated back to some pretty shady pre-Google-acquisition days, and highlighted alleged tactics that pointed fingers at Youtube’s founders. Equally bad behavior was alleged on the part of Viacom, who was accused of hiring a clan of promotions companies to upload “leaked” Viacom content to the site under pseudonyms. Naughty, naughty.

The fact of the matter is that Youtube—and Youtube-like services—are the way of the future in the eyes of the consumer. And, while no one can say Youtube is perfect in its attempt to “protect” content-owners, they surely seem to meet the DMCA provisions with the processes and technologies they’ve implemented to alert copyright owners. I just listened to a fascinating TED Talk last week from Google’s Margaret Gould Stewart, where she outlined Youtube’s methodologies to alert content owners to rights infringements.

Youtube has created a massive registry for rights holders where they can upload reference copies of their content. Then, Youtube runs EVERY piece of newly uploaded content against that registry—analyzing picture, audio, and more—to identify matches. The system is so sophisticated, allegedly, that it can account for quality degradation, video effects (slow-motion or speed-up), clip-extracts and more. When a match is found, the system alerts the copyright owners, who can then block the content altogether, or monetize it through advertising and product promotion. It’s a fascinating process—and the technology was so, well, cool that I was awestruck.

Then, I waited a few minutes, and started to scoff at this notion of protection for content owners. Perhaps it’s all my years having been a “content creator” and working for and with content owners. But, I couldn’t beat away the nagging question: why is the burden on the rights holder? And, I assure you, that same question was likely one of the largest on the minds of Viacom execs as they embarked on a now 4-year journey to take-out Youtube. It’s a large burden indeed. To protect your content, you must encode, upload and capture metadata about EVERY piece of content you own; you must think through and capture your protection policies about that content; and, you must review notifications when protected content is uploaded to determine the desired response (e.g. remove vs. monetize). Whipping out my calculator here, I see that amounts to a load of operational cost, resources and time for already strapped businesses. Imagine similar and probably more unwieldy processes taking place across other UGC aggregation sites. I’m not sure how that scales, even in the face of the revenue upside.

So, here I leave you with two sides of the coin. I should say that I am pleased with the verdict. And, I am, for the most part, impressed with Youtube’s processes to screen content, though I hesitate to see Youtube in the same beatific light they themselves suggest. There’s no question that Youtube and rights holders need to be, more than ever, partners in this eco-system. And, I’m not so sure we needed a judge to even confirm that. But, confirm he did. Here’s to 6-2-3. A milestone, indeed.

Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!

David Placke — 6/25/2010

I promised yesterday that normal service would be resumed, so the title of today’s post is a Kenneth Williams’ one-liner from the film “Carry on Cleo”. This gag was voted the funniest in film history - ahead even of Leslie Nielsen’s legendary “…and don’t call me Shirley” - in a poll conducted by Sky Movies. I mention this because it’s just possible that one day this very question will be all that separates you from the million Pounds / Euros / Dollars in “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”.

Actually I mention this because Williams plays the part of Julius Ceasar in the film and I need a tenuous link to the Roman Empire. (Did you see what I did there? Maybe I could do this for a living!)

Benjamin Disreali said of Rome: “A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man” – and to wander the streets of Rome is indeed to marvel that so much architecture, beauty and history can be consumed locally. What must it be like to live here; to be permanently surrounded by all of this? Does one eventually forget to stop and stare at the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Arch of Constantine? Do modern Romans instead hurry past all of this beauty to beat the morning rush at Starbucks?

And then, of course, there is the Forum. As impressive as the ruins undoubtedly are, you still need a vivid sense of imagination to see this place for what it really was two millennia ago: the very centre of the civilized world. As well as being arguably the world’s first global marketplace, the forum was the centre of the Roman Republic. Governed by a complicated system of rules reflecting the class system, the Roman Republic has since become synonymous with the very idea of “the public”. Legendary statesmen like Cicero sought popular acclaim here; and cunning politicians like Octavian (“I come to bury Cesar / not to praise him” – Shakespeare, Julius Cesar) instigated public outrages that eventually swept the Republic away. The times, it seems, have always been a-changing.

The ideal of the “forum” continues to thrive with the arrival of the Internet age, as people increasingly meet, flirt and debate online. Most of us welcome these new virtual opportunities for window shopping and self-expression; indeed, as Teradata technology supremo Stephen Brobst has pointed out in his Social Network Analysis presentation on our tour of the region, the younger generation increasingly prefer social networking tools to SMS, chat, e-mail and voice-calls.

But is there trouble in paradise? Facebook recently found itself in the centre of a storm after loosening its privacy rules and giving business partners much wider access to member profiles than before. The resulting publicity seems to have made many Facebook members consider for the first time whether they are revealing more about themselves than perhaps they should, with at least one survey claiming that a majority of users are considering withdrawing from the network altogether.

Beyond the confines of social networks, Google has been accused of intercepting access codes and data packages from private Wi-Fi networks with its Streetview cars. And the objective of the authors of the web-site entitled www.pleaserobme.com was to raise awareness of the risks associated with the “over-sharing” of geo-spatial data, rather than to actually provide material assistance to the criminal fraternity.

(When operational, www.pleaserobme.com was aggregating public Twitter messages that have been pushed through Foursquare - a service whose whole raison d’etre is to tell others where you are right now – and which, of course, enables others to infer that you are not at home. Having made their point, the creators of the site promptly shut down the aggregation process, although it is still worth visiting for the pop-art depiction of a grizzled felon.)

Social Networking and related technology is – just like genetic science – advancing faster than the modern public’s understanding of the consequences. And who is “the public” in today’s interconnected world, anyway? Teenagers in Sydney and Stockholm may soon have more in common with each other than with their older neighbours next door. And why would we expect a sixteen-year-old who has grown up with the Internet to see privacy and security through the same lens as a 60 year old former East German, with recent experience and bitter memories of living in a totalitarian surveillance state?

Against this background, there is an increasingly urgent need for Society to tackle the question of what organizations and States can – and cannot - legitimately do with these data. Social Networking tools are transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of us for the better; and the mountains of data that they generate have the potential to transform B2C businesses, as well, by providing insights into customer behaviours and preferences never before available. We will all be poorer if the slings and arrows of outrageous privacy infringements kill the goose just as it is laying the golden eggs.

One major European Teradata customer understands this better than most. The screensaver on the desktop PCs in its online division features a young girl, on the point of blowing out the candles on her birthday cake. “Why do you want my date of birth?”, reads the caption. “Are you going to send me a birthday present?” It’s a constant and visible reminder to staff: whenever you design business processes that will capture the personal data of consumers, you must ensure that customers know and understand both that the data will be stored and why the data will be stored.

Social media networks and other online services need the informed consent of their members if they are to survive and not be swept away, as the ancient Roman Republic eventually was. More than that, the smartest companies will increasingly come to see transparency and honesty about their information management practices as a competitive advantage. We would all rather do business with people that we trust. Just ask Julius Ceasar.

Walking the ghost back home

David Placke — 6/24/2010

Keen readers of this blog (hi Mum!) will have noted that I get much of my news from The Economist. Some attempt – mostly incorrectly - to infer my politics from this affiliation; whilst others recognize instead the value to the frequent traveler of a publication of such density and authority. Slim enough to fit into a laptop bag, an edition of The Economist nevertheless features reliable news reports from around the globe plus a passable survey of business, science, technology and the arts to boot. If it only had something as frivolous as a sports section…

It is also beautifully written. Witness the painful eloquence with which the paper reported the recent tragic death of the Polish President, Lech Kaczynski and his entourage - among them many of the country’s best and brightest - in a plane crash:

“The death of Poland's president carries a terrible echo of his country's past… the Katyn massacre, of 22,000 Polish officers in the spring of 1940… was more than the illegal execution of prisoners-of-war. It was the decapitation of the country’s pre-war elite. The officers, including many reservists, were the lawyers, doctors, teachers and intellectuals who would have posed the most profound challenge to the cynical division of Poland under the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.”

In a cruel twist of irony, Kaczynski and much of the cream of Polish intelligentsia were, of course, on their way to a ceremony to honour the Katyn dead; and so one elite was stolen and another died in attempting to celebrate their sacrifice.

Only the hardest heart could fail to be moved by Poland’s loss of two elites in less than 60 years – not to mention all of the other and greater losses that came before and after Katyn - just as only the strongest of those of us that fly regularly could fail to shudder inwardly at the pictures of the burning wreckage of Kaczynski’s plane. The Poles themselves, instead of preparing for their summer holidays, find themselves mid-way through an unexpected Presidential election, with all of the national soul-searching that accompanies such contests.

So, no long stories from me today; normal service – complete with bad jokes and torturous metaphors – will be resumed tomorrow. In the meantime, I will sign-off instead by sending my best wishes to all of my Polish friends and colleagues; by expressing my hope that the sincere and spontaneous outbursts of grief and sympathy from neighbors–and-former-adversaries to east and west will help to lay the ghosts and divisions of Katyn - and that which came before and after - to rest; and with these words of comfort, also from The Economist:

This… accident is appalling. But it does not derail Poland’s path to success, out of the ruins of the pre-war republic, from the devastation of war and communist rule…

Amen.

“On time and on budget!” but at what cost?

David Placke — 6/23/2010

How many times have we heard the Project Manager proudly announcing that they have delivered the project “on time and on budget” --- and you cringe? Over the past 3-4 months there have been a number of news articles on the recent Queensland Health payroll system implementation and the aftermath of no payments, incorrect payments and other such “tragedies”. Do a search on “Queensland Health Payroll” (or pay) to get some insight into the series of problems and fallout and scan a few of the reader comments as well.

My initial reaction to the news reports was “What was their testing/risk strategy?” and “Was an auditor on the team?”. My experience had been in the early 70s when we were converting a manual pay system to the computerised one – the employees were in a number of government departments which included both health workers and remote and regional workers. So naturally, the number and range of allowances variations was quite extensive and complex. OK – so we didn’t have 75000 people on the payroll but our computer systems were nowhere near as sophisticated or powerful as today’s to do regression testing and other automated data quality checks as part of risk management. We had to do a parallel run and manually check every payslip.

So what was the reaction of some of my colleagues who had “been around IT” for some time? Their initial observations were different. One said “What astounds me is the fact that there was no provision for manual payments.” This is a classic risk management strategy when payments (either payroll or debtor/creditor systems) are involved to ensure that legal obligations can be met. Surely when doing the risk assessment the scenario of “no payment” was identified and mitigated. Maybe they thought that it was ‘OK’ to miss one pay and it would be rectified by the second? In any event some people missed more than one pay and were in severe financial difficulties.

Another colleague observed “ah the old classic: ‘on time on budget’ – the project manager(s) controlling the project timeline without consideration of actual deliverables”. This issue is compounded with contracts and statements of work because large projects can’t normally be delivered in house. Anyway, we then started comparing notes on how business requirements seem to take the back seat when managing a project – after all they [the project manager/ implementer] get rewarded on the “on time on budget’ aspect of the functional success of the project. My colleague then went on to comment on the number of times he has seen the project “re-baselined” in lieu of keeping track of each change in effort for deliverables to maintain the time/budget factors. We had plenty of examples.

So when decisions are made to “go live” just because the project time (or contact period) is up – just take stock of everything that have been swept under the carpet to do so. The problems don’t go away – in fact they are amplified.

When you go into a large project and place the three core variables on the table – namely: time, cost and functionality, understand under what circumstances each can change – and if you have at least one variable that is fixed (which is often time) – then have all the functionality prioritised by business (not the project manager) into:

mandatory (must deliver in the project),
desirable (can be delivered as a minor release), and
optional (can be delivered as incremental BAU improvements)

so that the functional bar can be raised to keep cost contained and delivering the mandatory set as the minimum.

In the shadow of the Stephansdom

David Placke — 6/22/2010

Oh, Vienna! If, like me, you are of a certain age, you will find it almost impossible to say those words, rather than sing them out loud. Our formative years, it turns out, are just that.

This was my third or fourth visit to Vienna, but the first time that I actually got to see more of the city than the airport and a business hotel. And there is a lot to see: Vienna, former capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, has enough Imperial majesty and Romanesque, Baroque and Classical splendour for three capitals, never mind one. The beauty is more than skin-deep; successive surveys by the Economist Intelligence Unit and international HR consultancy Mercer have ranked Vienna amongst the very best cities in the world to live. Most importantly, I found a great bar near the Stephansdom with cold beer and that was showing the football! I hope that my Spanish friends enjoyed the game, but I predict that the fact that David Villa’s left leg is only for standing on will cost you dearly later in the tournament…

Austria’s most famous recent export is arguably Arnold Schwarzenegger. I thought of The Governator recently when reading an article in The Economist, concerning the development of metals that can heal themselves. Are the researchers employed by Skynet? Is the rise of The Terminators upon us?

Probably not. Whilst the twin disciplines of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics have made incredible strides in recent years, building a robot that resembles anything like a human being in form or in function is still an elusive goal, the preserve of science fiction, not engineering reality. The next generation of smart robots are more likely to resemble amoebas than Terminators, although as this article points out, many of us “may find the idea of having an autonomous blob roaming around inside [us]” at least as frightening as we find the idea of pathological robots roaming the planet.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to pour scorn on the past visions of many of the futurologists: we don’t fly to work in sky-cars; and neither do we meet all of our nutritional needs by popping a single pill. But in some respects, the technological future that is almost upon us is even more incredible. “The Internet of Things” may shortly connect very nearly everything with everything else. A world in which 50 to 100 trillion objects are equipped with sensor technology and can be identified, tracked, measured and interact with one another is in the line of sight.

RFID tags, by way of example, have had a slower and more painful gestation than was originally prophesied, but the technology is increasingly robust and is likely to be much more widely deployed in the near future. The tracking of items all the way through the supply chain will revolutionize the Retail and Transportation and Logistics industries. Retailers, for example, will for the first time be able to understand whether you purchased that FIFA World Cup promotional pack of beer from the aisle display or the display at the till. Much more interestingly from the point of view of the consumer, your fridge will know that the steak you bought nearly a week ago needs to be cooked today or thrown away. And will e-mail you at work to tell you that it has ordered a pepper sauce, potatoes, a nice, crisp salad and a bottle of Bordeaux to go with it, to arrive just after you get home in the evening. Cheers!

Some of this is already upon us. A leading aero engine manufacturer streams engine data (component performance, temperature, vibration, etc., etc.) from networks of sensors distributed throughout the engines to a Teradata database whilst the aeroplane that the engines power is still in flight. Analysing this data and correlating it with historical engine data enables said manufacturer to predict when components will fail and to arrange for scheduled, preventative maintenance.

For passengers this is reassuring, but the real impact is an economic one; mercifully, modern aircraft rarely fall out of the sky because their engines fail - but they are sometimes grounded for unscheduled maintenance. This unscheduled maintenance represents a vast cost to the airlines - and to the engine manufacturers, who are increasingly obliged to provide their power plants on a lease or “power by the hour” basis. Spot that a particular sub-component is running hot - and that this is characteristic of the failure of a larger component within the next 30 hours of flying time - and you can get a replacement engine bearing (and an engineer qualified to fit it) to the engine and the aeroplane concerned, before the former grounds the latter. This sort of technology enables leading operators to keep their aircraft in the air for close to 18 hours in every 24; a remarkable achievement when you consider how complex a system a modern commercial airliner is.

None of which is remotely as cool as my current favourite application of sensor technology: the Wembley mousetrap. I’ve told this story before, but it’s so good that it bears repeating.

The mousetraps at the new Wembley stadium are equipped with mobile phone chips and “phone home” when they detect that they have caught a rodent. As is often the case where the introduction of new technology is concerned, the principal motivation is to improve operational efficiency; the same number of smart traps require fewer maintenance staff than does an equivalent number of dumb traps, because now we only need send someone to empty the traps that have caught something, rather than to check every trap, every day.

Keep the detailed data, however, and now you can forecast when a particular trap could next be expected to become temporary home to one of our furry friends. Now when a trap catches a rodent at 5PM on a Friday, the stadium operator can make an intelligent decision about whether to pay overtime to empty it - or leave the “sleeping” rodent to lie until Monday.

Integrate these data with other data and things start to get really interesting: by overlaying the location of the traps on a drawing of the stadium and using a heat map I can start to understand where the traps that catch the most rodents are located and which routes the vermin are using to get into the stadium; add the location of the fast food outfits and now I know who isn’t managing the trash properly; and so on and so on and so on… When sensor technology, combined with best practice approach to information management (keep the detailed data, integrate the data with other data) can revolutionize something as banal as the humble mousetrap, you know it is an idea whose time has come.

Sensor technology will soon be ubiquitous. Detailed data from networks of intelligent sensors – especially when integrated with other data - will give the organizations that we serve and that serve us unprecedented insight into all manner of behaviours and processes, existing and not yet imagined. And all of these sensor measurements will be associated with a time and a place, both of which will be critical to our understanding of the meaning of these measurements. Time we discussed yesterday, place or “location” is a theme to which we will return in due course. But for now it’s time for me to re-locate to 52° 14’ North, 21° 0’ East; via 48° 11’ North, 16° 56’ East. Adios, amigos!

Bumping Along

Sandra Worley — 6/22/2010

I love to travel, unless it involves flying. Several good reasons could explain why—crowded planes, canceled flights, high fares—but what really bothers me is a fear of turbulence. Oh, sure, people have tried to calm my nerves by saying things like, “Flying is safer than driving,” or, “Think of turbulence as merely speed bumps in the sky.” But when the aircraft I’m on starts rockin’ and rollin’, I retort with, “I’d rather be on the ground wishing I was flying than being on this plane wishing I was not!”

Financial institutions (FIs) have been coping with market turbulence for some time now. While they’re zeroed in on obtaining timely, accurate information to keep performance improvement running smoothly, they’re often bumped off course by isolated data. In the Teradata Magazine article “A comprehensive vision,” two Deloitte Consulting principals navigate a course for FIs that integrates financial and risk data to gain timely and accurate information.

I have a vision of me next month when I’ll be flying to Nashville for a family wedding: sweaty palms, white knuckles, wide eyes. Oh, sure, the old saying “A turtle never goes anywhere unless she sticks her head out” is applicable. It won’t comfort me much, however, when I’m encased in the plane’s shell.

Ginny Wennen
Associate Editor
Teradata Magazine

The Time Traveller’s Life

David Placke — 6/21/2010

And so back to Blighty on the Eurostar. Home for me is Sheffield and so I experienced a sense of dislocation as we pulled into St. Pancras station. Normally my arrival there signifies the start of a journey, this time it was something else; not quite a homecoming - and not quite a beginning, either.

Still I shouldn’t complain too much about finding myself in London on the eve of England’s second World Cup qualifier. The train to Sheffield tomorrow should get me home to my family just in time for the second half of the game; had the 18th found us in Moscow or Rome, I would be likely to miss the entire match. England’s third and decisive tie next Wednesday afternoon will find me in Warsaw, pretending to pay attention to Teradata technology supremo, Stephen Brobst, whilst frantically texting my friends back home for minute-by-minute updates.

Of course, we English – not to be confused with the Brits, a wider clan that includes our Celtic cousins – are often regarded as rather aloof, cold even. Not a bit of it! Beneath the thin veneer of the “stiff upper lip” we are more sentimental even than the Italians.

To see the truth of this assertion, mention “1966” to any red-blooded Englishman, then watch as his eyes mist over and prepare to be regaled with tales of footballing heroics for several hours. Never mind that many of us - myself included – were not even born when England won the World Cup by defeating West Germany 4-2; never mind that one of the crucial goals may not even have crossed the goal line; this was surely the greatest game of football ever played! If time travel machines are ever invented and commercialized, the queue to get into the 1966 Wembley World Cup Final will be extended by several million Englishmen, all of us trembling in anticipation.

(If, however, you prefer the stiff upper lip on your Englishman, use instead the phrases “1970”, “Peter Bonetti” and “howler”; unfortunately, we English have experienced erratic goalkeeping before Rob Green re-acquainted us with it in the game against the USA last Saturday.)

Funny thing, time. As I pointed out in my Paris blog recently, perception and reality are frequently not aligned as well as we might like them to be, especially in the Data Warehouse. Consider that facts are typically recorded in any database some time after they occur in “the real world” – and that even in these days of near real-time data acquisition, several systems may lie between the data warehouse and the actual business event in question. Consider also that this latency – the gap between the timing of an action and its recording in the database - can vary very significantly: human beings forget to run an end-of-day process, delaying the transmission of point-of-sale data for some store or other by hours or days; telecommunications switches go on strike and hold on to call detail records for far longer than they should, etc., etc., etc. Not only that, but with the increasing use of the Data Warehouse for predictive modelling, we increasingly want to store forecast values for the same variable, as calculated at multiple, different points in time.

This problem has long been recognized and understood in academic circles; researchers studying the representation of temporal data distinguish between “valid time” (the interval during which a certain state persists – or is forecast to persist - in the external world); and “transaction time” - the set of times that a particular proposition was represented in the database as being true.

And databases have another problem with the representation of time: the concept of an interval is not natively supported in the ANSI SQL standard. We timestamp data rows with a representation of the point-in-time that some event occurred, but when we want to know “how long has this been true” or “how long since this has been true” we must identify and compare multiple columns and/or rows. This makes these queries difficult to express and inefficient to run.

It gets (even more) complex. When we represent time in the database, we should really take care to enforce a number of different temporal constraints: something shouldn’t end before it has begun; particular states shouldn’t overlap with one another (what does it mean if I am recorded as married between 2002 and now and 1999 and now?); and so on.

Attentive readers will note that I just introduced the rather ambiguous expression “now” with careless abandon. In fact it is more correct to speak of “the moving point now”: it is now 19:11:06 on Thursday 17th June, for example – but in a minute, “now” will be 19:12:06 and a minute later “now” will be 19:13:06 and a minute later…

How much support does the majority of ANSI SQL-based database technology provide for the management of all of this complexity? Basically, none. A customer wishing to represent valid and transaction time in the database, for example, must add 4 timestamp columns to every table in the database and then write complex DDL and DML statements over-and-over-and-over to keep the data consistent and to extract meaningful temporal information from it. This was a significant issue before the data warehouse started to become a key regulatory-and-compliance reporting platform in many organizations; now it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Regulation, of course, is in fashion like never before. The new government in Britain wants the banking sector to pay a new levy to reimburse the taxpayer for some of the cost of supporting our, ahem, rather over-extended financial institutions. At international level, an update of the Basel Accord (Basel III) is underway, designed to tighten rules concerning risk exposure, liquidity and obligatory equity capital buffers. An impact study currently underway using real data provided voluntarily by 300 banks from around the world has apparently been something of a challenge for some of the institutions concerned; it was reported in the German edition of the Financial Times last week that at one German bank, 20 employees had laboured for 3 months just to extract these data (you won’t be surprised to learn that the institution in question does not have an Enterprise Data Warehouse solution from Teradata). Privacy and security concerns and the general “anti-business” sentiment that is the (probably inevitable) consequence of recent travails mean that other industries, too, face increased regulation.

All of which is why the marquee feature in the next release of the Teradata DBMS (13.10, due in the second half of this year) is native temporal support: period data types and operators to represent intervals; temporal tables in which temporal semantics are automatically applied by the DBMS; automated maintenance of temporal data, resulting in the hassle-free creation of history rows; easy-peasy-to-express temporal queries (what is, what was, what will be); and all of the above implemented and optimized for scalable, high-performance parallel execution, using an approach based on the closest thing that the database industry has to a standard. Think of it as time travel for the data warehouse.

Monday (valid time) will find us in Vienna; I’ll tell you all about it in my next blog post, uploaded and available on Tuesday (transaction time).

Your friends are bad for your health

David Placke — 6/18/2010

I think that someone once said, “The man who has grown tired of Paris has grown tired of life itself”. And that is a sentiment with which I was in complete agreement as I strolled from my hotel to the venue for the Paris leg of our CTO Tour in the sunshine. True, the entente cordiale had been strained somewhat by the fact that the landing page for the Wi-Fi service in my hotel had wanted me to click on an American flag for English language instructions – a fact that my travelling companion, Teradata technology supremo Stephen Brobst found hilarious - but Paris is beautiful in the sunshine and life was good. Arriving at the venue, I greeted a French colleague warmly and told him what a beautiful day it was. “Nonsense!”, he told me, “it’s cold for June!” Perception and reality, you see, are not always the same thing – a theme to which we will return in a future post.

My perception is shaped by the cool, damp island to the west that I am proud to call home, but such is the pull of Paris that throughout recent history people have been drawn here from all over the world: artists, tourist, gourmets, businessmen. Paris has accommodated large expat communities from the English-speaking world since the 19th century - including Irishman James Joyce, singer and bon viveur Jim Morrisson and American writer Henry James - and many other great men and women besides that have enjoyed huge cultural influence on their home countries whilst living on the banks of the Seine. Joyce, for example, was able to publish his Ulysses here, remaining safe from prosecution, though the work was deemed to be obscene in both the UK and the US and was therefore banned. And the attraction still remains, partly perhaps because you don’t always know what’s going on and what’s going to happen next.

In today’s globalized economy, there are probably more expats all over the world than ever before (including my parents, surrounded by vineyards and sunshine in the South of France). Expats often band together, of course, united by a common experience. The Facebook generation might like to think that is has invented social networking - just as the Baby Boomers like to think that they invented sex in the 60s – but those tight-knit groups of expats, artists and musicians from down the years prove that actually, social networks are as old as human interaction itself. The tools, methods and the speed of communication may have changed, but most everything else remains the same.

The science of social network analysis also pre-dates Facebook and Twitter (think Stanley Milgram’s decades old “Six Degrees of Separation” experiment): people (“nodes”) are connected to one another by relationships, direct and indirect. Graph theory and related mathematical techniques then enable us to quantify the strength and depth of these networks. And we can identify and measure relationships in all sorts of ways that don’t necessarily involve Facebook, Twitter and the rest; if you and I transfer money to one another or call one another - to name but two examples - then a quantifiable relationship exists between us. And some of these relationships can even identify us; you might change your mobile phone provider, but you still call your Mother – and probably at the same time every Sunday after lunch (or maybe that’s just me).

If that all sounds rather worthy and academic, then consider this intriguing fact: statistically at least, it is probable that your friends are more popular than you are. This is called the “friendship paradox” and it arises because human networks rely on “connectors”: the popular people that we all know and want to be friends with; the people who always know what’s going on and where it’s at; the human glue that cement our relationships with our wider social circle.

Identify the connectors and many interesting possibilities are available to you. Recent research, for example, suggests that the oh-so-popular connectors contract illnesses before most of the rest of us (serves them right) - they are in contact with more people, after all, each of whom has a finite chance of being infected - and play an important role in the spread of epidemics, because they then go on to infect all of their other many friends after contracting the dread disease themselves. It follows that if health authorities knew who these people were, they could spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current surveillance methods. Perhaps our friends should carry a Government Health Warning?

Connectors are also very interesting to marketing types, as – just like bands of expats - we fickle humans tend to value the opinions of our friends and family much more than we value the opinions of strangers with whom we share little and have no common experience. Identify the influencers in the social networks and influence them yourself and you realize a powerful multiplier effect. It follows that traditional recency-frequence-value approaches to customer segmentation – as valuable as they often are - tell only part of the story; an “unprofitable” customer may actually be very profitable indeed, because the value of the trade that they bring to you may greatly exceed the value of their direct contribution.

Facebook, Twitter and their ilk potentially take this to a whole new level; if I can persuade you to share your data with me – by offering you a free download each week if you become a “fan” of my brand, for example – then I can understand what you think of me (by running sentiment analyses on your posts) and who you are influencing (by assessing how well connected you are). Bring all of this information together in one place with all of the rest of the organization’s data and you have something very close to a true, three-hundred-and-sixty degree view of the consumer. For example, if I complain about the price of the new iPhone 4 but then the sales data shows that I bought one anyway, then Apple probably has the price about right; but if I moan about the price and don’t purchase, then it could be that I and all of my friends are about to desert to Nokia or Google Android.

All of which is why Apple should send me the new iPhone and iPad immediately, to arrive at the venue – Altitude 360, Millbank Tower – for the London leg of our CTO Road Show for Friday. Well, it’s worth a try!

I know what Google really loves me for (and it’s not my brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat)

David Placke — 6/16/2010

And so to Brussels. I’d be lying if I told you that I got to see much of the city on this trip, but you should have seen my room at the Plaza Hotel! As big as a penthouse flat, sumptuously appointed - and complete with a box of Belgian chocolates and a hand-written welcome note from the General Manager. Clearly a member of the hotel staff made a terrible error and confused me with someone important; possibly the Ambassador from Belarus found himself in the box room next to the elevator that ordinarily would have been mine!

One thing that even a brief visit to Brussels teaches you is how many languages the locals seem to speak fluently: English; French; Flemish; German – pas problem! I don’t know if this is because the Belgians have historically found themselves to be intermediaries between the larger powers located to east and west – or maybe the arrival of the EU institutions in the city acted as a catalyst – but it is striking, nonetheless.

Brits abroad, of course, are frequently embarrassed by the fact that the locals - in addition to the feat of mastering their own apparently impossibly complex native tongue - often speak English better than they do. I, on the other hand, am a master linguist – and will send an iPod Shuffle to the first non-Teradata reader from outside of Poland who can correctly answer the following question: Bob Dylan, na którym ma album utworu "Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat" pojawiają się i gdzie to było nagrane?

Now if you know me even slightly, you know that my facility with foreign languages does not extend beyond a smattering of schoolboy French and German. So how did I do that? Well, the answer has something to do with Brussels, something to do with Silicon Valley – and a lot to do with statistical analysis.

Ask yourself this question: who has the best spell-checker in every language? Not Microsoft, despite the fact that they have laboured for two decades and spent millions in pursuit of the same; but Google.

And how did Google build their world-beating spell-checker? With the junk that the other search engines throw away. Hundreds of millions of users type misspellings into Google Search every day; hoover-up all of those misspellings – and create a feedback loop by asking users if really they meant “potato” and not “potatoe” – and you create the mother of all training sets that you can then recursively analyze to learn from the wisdom of the global crowd of Googlers (Googli?). Genius.

Note two key lessons from all of this. First, you need detailed data; capturing mere summary statistics on how often a search term is typed into Google that doesn’t match a dictionary spelling is not enough; you need the details of all of the misspellings. Secondly, the garbage is the data; apparently worthless “data exhaust” from one business process (search) has been re-purposed for another, entirely different process (translation). If Google can turn even misspellings into gold then there is potential value in every piece of data that your organization can collect, you just haven’t found it thus far. And unless you’re Google, you’re probably not yet ready to pay to store it all forever, either. Both of these things may change – and sooner than we think.

Google Translate – the secret to my sudden mastery of Polish – works on a similar basis: take copies of the same document – actually, lots of documents - that have already been expertly translated into multiple different languages and use statistical inference techniques to identify which word or phrase in one text is the most likely equivalent in a second text, and so on and so on. And this is where Brussels comes in; Google Search had already been used to index what is probably the largest body of high-quality translations available in any one place: copies of all of the European Commission documents, which are routinely and expertly translated into 20 different languages. (One suspects that in many cases they are read rather less avidly than they are produced, but that is another matter altogether.)

Previous attempts at machine translation have almost all taken a rules-based approach: attempt to codify the structure of language; understand the – sometimes arbitrary and ambiguous – rules that define where nouns and verbs go in a sentence, which are the correct tenses and so on. Of course, because of the huge variations and ambiguities in natural language, all of the exceptions to the rules need to be programmed in, too.

Edward Felten of Princeton University was quoted recently in a special report for The Economist (if you didn’t see it first time around, search for the special report entitled “Data, data everywhere” at http://www.economist.com to buy a re-print) that discussed this and related trends. On this sort of machine learning he said this: “’Understanding’ turns out to be overrated, and statistical analysis goes a lot of the way.”

I am not as eloquent as Pofessor Felten, but I’ll attempt to paraphrase what I think he means: if you aren’t also using predictive and statistical analytics to discover inferences and patterns that are beyond the capabilities of a mark one human eyeball to detect, then you’re hosed and Google and the others will eat you. (Well, I did warn you that I wasn’t as eloquent as the good professor.)

None of which is to say that all of the “traditional” Business Intelligence – the reports, dashboards, visualizations, etc., etc. – that help us to understand our businesses don’t add real value, because clearly “traditional” BI adds enormous value and isn’t going away. But an effective, data-driven organization needs to go further – and it follows than an effective data warehouse needs to be able to support all of these different workloads, all of the time. If the lights go out and everything stops the moment the propeller-heads in your organization attempt anything more ambitious than a batch report summarizing sales performance, then Houston, you have a problem.

One more rhetorical question before I board the train to Paris: what would Google do with the data that you throw away?

A bientôt, mes amis.

Damage Control

Sandra Worley — 6/15/2010

Floods. Oil spills. Earthquakes. Sinkholes. Disasters such as these rattle our mettle as well as our nerves, leaving us to wonder when and where the next catastrophe will strike—and how it will affect the businesses we depend on.

When multiple wildfires ravaged San Diego County in 2007, the city of Rancho Bernardo, Calif., was shut down, as were the Teradata Research and Development and Global Support Center (GSC) that are located there. And even while a million people were safely evacuated, including Teradata associates working at the site, the GSC continued to function, supporting hundreds of businesses’ data warehouses thanks to a lot of teamwork and some pretty innovative technology. To learn how the GSC was able to do it, read “Tested under fire” by Imad Birouty.

Catastrophic events will continue to occur, but with the appropriate plans in place crucial data can be kept secure—and accessible.

Ginny Wennen
Associate Editor
Teradata Magazine

Graduation Time-- Tissues Needed. Digital Supply Chain is All Grown Up!

Colleen Quinn — 6/15/2010

I pride myself, perhaps without merit, on creating witty, funny, life-affirming blog posts which are generally joys to read. Amusing and insightful. There’s something you don’t get every day. But, there’s nothing amusing about losing money and nothing insightful about missed opportunity. Today’s post, my friends, asks the question: has the time come for our emerging digital supply chain to stop emerging, and start achieving its promise as a fully realized, fully accountable line of business. Is our baby ready, to put it another way, to take its first real steps into adulthood?

I’m ruminating today on discussion from this year’s ESCA Edge Supply Chain conference, which took place a couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles. I attended the ESCA event last year for the first time, and it struck me how much our world—the world of making, managing, moving and monetizing content—has changed. The event was a smashing success (both in 2009 and 2010, I hear), succeeding where other industry shows hadn’t yet. You see, I never thought of myself as a “supply chain” person. Supply chain (yawn!) focused almost exclusively on the movement of physical goods. Supply Chain was for duller professional adventures than my own. Oh sure, we’d bandied-about the term “digital supply chain” some years back in digital entertainment, but we thought our world unencumbered by the challenges faced by our friends in Home Entertainment. And, I’m sure the Home Entertainment crowd shared a set of opinions about digital media: new technology cowboys running roughshod over a seasoned industry. Or, as NBC-U’s Jeff Zucker once suggested, none-too-serious dabblers in a world of digital pennies. Analog dollars were the real business.

After attending ESCA in 2009, it became apparent that the organizers, at least, were far savvier than the aforementioned “thems” and “us-es.” ESCA was making the point that we were in this together. Suddenly, digital media was everyone’s problem—including the supply chain guys. I’d never heard so many people fretting about the digital media supply chain in one place. I nearly laughed out loud when I realized the panel I’d been asked to sit on felt more like coming home than work. It was time to listen to each other, it seemed. There were many reasons for our collective interest. Most were looking for the inflection point for digital content distribution—the point at which physical businesses were perceived as having been trumped by the new kid; others were inheriting the digital businesses under their Home Entertainment umbrellas; and still others were realizing that we all just needed to get along, if nothing else.

Jump to 2010. Studios have been facing the hard-realities of multi-platform distribution for something approaching 5-years. The Digital Supply Chain—yes, that’s the official term now— is no longer a line of business for dabblers. Studios must shift from thinking of these businesses as emergent and transitional to steady and performing. And, while 2009 showed ESCA organizers at the forefront, the conversation in 2010 reflected that the general audience was in agreement. By acknowledging that digital businesses are, in some ways, the studios’ future, folks from across the enterprise now have serious a stake in making these businesses successful.

The notion of digital pennies isn’t bearing out at all. Perhaps—and still, only in some cases-- the per-unit revenues for digital downloads may be less than physical, but the volumes are greater and margins ostensibly higher. This isn’t news. Time Warner’s CFO, John Martin, said just this week that Warner is “aggressively transitioning” their physical business because they anticipate the success of their digital businesses. Martin, I’m sure, also knows that digital businesses are successful only when they can scale to drive the right margins across this fragmented ecosystem.

I use the word “anticipate” intentionally. Climbing that maturity curve to better margin and profitability in these new channels is tough. Multiplatform distribution, in its dizzying array of processes, specifications, possibilities—its sheer scale— requires content owners optimize processes that have scarcely been introduced. The need to drive cost out of the supply chain—this new supply chain—is critical to convert those supposed pennies to dollars. I can see Home Entertainment executives nodding their heads from here.

There are several areas where content owners can start to see immediate relief. I’m frankly out of time to do justice to these areas in this post, so I’ll name them now to give you food for thought, with the promise to elaborate later. The first is metadata management. I’ll just ask anyone reading this post to take a quick count of the number of title or product management systems in use at your company today. I’d ask you to mentally run through the process of prepping a single title for output. Enough said. What about the promise of DAM for content re-use and repurposing? Does it bear-out when you think about how many times you re-encode the same piece of content to fulfill to your distributors? Finally, imagine for a moment you do fulfill content everywhere it needs to go, on-time and in the right package. Do you have the tools in place to track that content’s performance against your bottom line? Is it easy to know how the licensing deal performs relative to others like it?

There’s something exciting about watching your baby graduate and head-off to college… this is, as pathetic how it sounds, how I feel about digital supply chain. And, along with college—if I may painfully draw-out this metaphor a bit more—comes additional responsibility. Say, making ends meet on your own. Maturity has its downside, I guess. But, I have total faith in my baby. I may need a box of tissues for proud tears at ESCA 2011. Stay tuned.

Sulking in Munich

David Placke — 6/15/2010

Monday found us in Munich at TDWI, where Stephen was doing the hard work and I was carrying the bags (not much change there, then). I had been hoping to greet him with news of England’s demolition of the USA in our Group C match on Saturday, but, not for the first time, the bragging rights were Stephen’s after England had only managed a 1-1 draw. It would all be so much easier to bear if I hadn’t spent Sunday evening watching the second half of the Germany game in the bar of my Munich hotel. Germany, having demolished Australia 4-0, look to be in fine form. And who will England likely play if we now finish second in Group C? Germany, of course...

At TDWI, Stephen presented on Social Network Analysis and Social Media Analytics. I’ll blog about Social Network Analysis another time, but for now let’s focus on Social Media and the opportunities that it presents for business.

Organizations wanting to understand how consumers really feel about their products have traditionally paid large sums of money to Market Research companies to conduct interviews with a representative sample of their customers. Nothing wrong with that - but the time it takes to commission the agency, conduct the research, normalize and present the results can be a brake on new product development. And, of course, there are inherent risks in sampling populations - which in practice are typically anything but homogenous - and in interogative research techniques (people routinely mislead pollsters about their voting intentions, for example).

Consider now that 15,000 tweets - and counting - are posted every minute on Twitter and that 20% of them contain opinions about products, services and brands. Or that Facebook, if it were a country, would be the 3rd largest in the world by population – and that more than half of these 350M+ Facebook users have recommended or discussed a product or brand online (OMG!). Then there are the millions of consumer reviews on sites like Amazon.com. Last-and-by-every-means-least there’s this blog, with it’s ever-so-slighty smaller (but I like to think no less loyal) audience and my therefore slightly-less publically professed devotion to a Cupertino-based manufacturer of cool gadgets.

The Web is the Database
If this data were available to the marketing department, it would represent a treasure trove: accessible in near real-time; free from sampling bias; and available for free, or something close to it, at least as compared with the costs of large-scale market research.

Of course this data is increasingly available to the marketing department, as the Social Media sites attempt to “monetize” their millions of users and as more-and-more sophisticted software from organizations like Teradata partner WebTrends is developed to “crawl” the public web and harvest “sentiment data”. Which is how a certain manufactuer of vertically integrated appliance products bearing a cool fruit-based logo knows what I want before I even know that I want it – and has a pretty good idea what I’ll pay for it, too.

Sentiment analysis – basically advanced text mining of web data – can reveal the consumers’ intentions, aspiration and overall brand engagement. The analysis relates brand or product names with expressions that indicate a positive or negative opinion, which can be tricky if you take into account the vagaries and ambigities of human language (more on this in a minute). Still, the analytical methods are now sophisticated enough to deliver valuable results about 95% of the time. For example, they alerted an appliance manufacturer to the travails of one particular customer who was sharing his unpleasant experience with one of the company’s product via Twitter: he had received a faulty product three times in a row! This gave the company the opportunity to contact the customer quickly, make sure that he got a working device and solicit his reccomendations for the re-design of the product’s packaging, to avoid other customer’s being similarly inconvenienced. A textbook case.

Getting the data is one thing, making sense of it another altogether. This data isn’t like the “square” relational data that we’ve all spent the last two decades becoming expert at loading into our data warehouses. Fortunately, the “fact extraction” technology required to extract square, relational meta-data from a whole variety of “unstructured” data has come a long way in recent years; in particular, text mining of web data has, as Stephen delicately puts it, “advanced significantly since September 11th, 2001, when there was increased investment in this space”. Comercially available technology like that from Teradata partner Attensity enables extracted facts to be loaded into a high-performance parallel database and compared with existing transaction and interaction data for a complete understanding of how consumer sentiment drives demand. Or otherwise.

You’d better start swimmin’
Other companies, like US home electronics dealer and Teradata customer BestBuy, even go so far as to cultivate customer-to-customer recommendations. BestBuy provides a website where customers can review products and easily publish them on Facebook and Twitter. The company thus can benchmark reviews and match them with the actual sales figures. They can easily answer questions like: are the comments about a certain product consistent? Do comments mirror sales? And which recommendations are our customers actually willing to pass on? And a product or brand that you are prepared to recommend to friends and family is one that you have a tangible, emotional investment in.

Traditional market research won’t disappear entirely. But just as Google’s Internet advertising platform has changed the entire advertising industry, Social Media Analytics in general and Sentiment Analysis in particular will change profoundly the way that companies interact with their customers and prospective customers. As Stephen says: “ as of 2010, Gen Y outnumbers the Baby Boomers - and 96% of them have joined an on-line social network.” As a direct consequence, more people now communicate with Social Networking tools than exchange messages with e-mail. That’s a lot of data, much of which will increasingly be available to organizations that find creative ways to incentivise consumers to share it. Better start swimmin’.

The excitement of being first

David Placke — 6/14/2010

The excitement of being first starts at a very young age, my two little girls are for ever racing somewhere and it is quite common to have tears from the girl who comes second. But this in-build need to be first does not stop as you get bigger, we line up in the cold for concert tickets, then its iPhones and most recently it is iPads, so what is it all for?

I believe it is inherent in humankind to want to evolve, it is a part of our survival. The slowest get eaten in the jungle. So it comes as no surprise that organisations are forever evolving, they are, after all, made up of people. Given that we need to evolve, the only remaining question is where are we going?

I use a map to get to a place I have never been before, organisational evolution is no different, it requires a destination (vision) and a map (strategy). What is assumed, is that the map exists and that we understand how to read it, but with organisational evolution that map has to be developed.

What if analysis is the process of developing a map for organisational evolution, by understanding where you are today and looking at where you would be under a different set of assumptions we can prototype the possibilities.

The human brain does this millions of times every second, the organisational brain needs the help of a corporate memory (EDW) and brilliant people, and that is where you come in.

Daniel Tehan

Lost in Frankfurt

David Placke — 6/14/2010

It’s Friday and so it must be Frankfurt and the 3rd stop of our 2010 EMEA Teradata CTO Road Show.

I always find flying into Frankfurt a slightly surreal experience. From the air, the city seems to me to have been set-down fully-formed in the middle of the forest, as if someone had taken a giant cookie-cutter and made a space just big enough to accommodate it, and no bigger.

Arriving in Frankfurt last year on tour with Teradata technology supremo Stephen Brobst was no less surreal, despite the fact that we arrived directly in the city centre around 1AM, after a long train ride from Switzerland. Always overly-proud of my iPhone, I had confidently informed Stephen that I would be able to get us from the station to our hotel with the aid of Google Maps and my favourite piece of technology, but, tired and confused, I failed to orient the map correctly and sent us in the wrong direction instead. “A fool with a tool is still a fool”, as the old expression has it – or perhaps it was a case of One Too Many Mornings.

My new-ish - yet soon-to-be-obsolete - 3GS model, complete with built-in compass, should enable me to do better next time I am called upon to navigate. Surely even die-hard technophobes cannot fail to be impressed by how fast these devices are developing and that this progress takes place on all levels: user interfaces keep getting better, new apps pop up like mushrooms (some of them are even useful!) and widespread corporate deployment is now getting underway - all of which means that there is a wealth of opportunities for mobile analytical apps that is not yet being exploited. Plus an urgent requirement for an app that will enable me to locate the nearest sports bar showing the England World Cup game! (After the Frankfurt event we all gathered to watch the opening match of the competiton, but, alas the rest of our busy schedule in June is less accommodating of a lapsed Sheffield Wednesday and England fan)

Mobile phone services help countries develop
You might think – like my wife – that I am as shallow as a glass-of-water and will do anything to justify buying a new gadget (and you’d be right, but say with me here). In fact, mobile technology is changing society in ways that are rather more profound than my playing PacMan on my iPhone at departure gates across Europe. Take the continent where the World Cup is being played, for example; in Africa - and virtually all the least developed countries (LDC) – penetration of mobile phone services now exceeds penetration of fixed line services. In fact, mobile telephony is rapidly becoming the standard for telecommunications, with growth rates of 30 to 50 percent over the last few years.

All of this is having a huge impact on these societies – and mostly for the better. Mobile communications technology, for example, enables remote diagnosis, alleviating the shortage of doctors in rural areas and the time and cost associated with travelling from these areas to the cities (prohibitive, if you are one of the 80% of the global population living on $10 a day or less of the population living on less than $10 a day). This already happens in Bangladesh and could be adopted elsewhere soon. In the future, nurses could perform examinations in villages and transmit data from all sorts of medical devices (ECG etc.) to hospitals and get diagnoses from specialised physicians in real-time. And in South Africa, the “Masiluleke” project already spreads information about preventive measures against HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis via SMS.

Mobile phones also make small businesses more independent. According to this study, Indian fishermen used always to land their fish at their home port – but now use their mobile phones to determine the port with the best prices instead. Farmers can trade and insure their crops without using expensive intermediaries. And In Kenya, the largest mobile carrier has introduced a mobile payment service that allows users to transfer money to other individuals as well as to deposit and withdraw funds from their account via SMS. With nearly 80 percent of all adult Kenyans owning a mobile, these services will give millions of the poorest affordable access to reliable, basic financial services and protection form exploitative middlemen, cheats and thieves.

The explosion in demand for mobile services and their rapid diversification means that the “land grab” for carrier market share is entering a new phase. Morgan Stanley predicts that in 2 year’s time high-speed mobile networks will be available to more than 25 per cent of the population of the Middle East, Africa and the Asian Pacific (excluding Japan). All of which means that both incumbent and new players will be competing for tens of millions of new subscribers – and as the example of Teradata customer Etisalat Misr, which has achieved amazing growth in the relatively saturated Egyptian mobile market over the past few years by providing new, better and more reliable services for very carefully targeted groups and areas reminds us – the race is not always to the strong. The next round of the competition in emerging markets may well be decided by the equally well-targeted provision of services like mobile payment.

They are about to take off, and so am I; home to friends and family for the weekend and to watch the football. C’mon England!

Head Games

Darryl McDonald — 7/12/2010

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

Summertime in Stockholm

David Placke — 6/11/2010

We didn’t make it to Stockholm – or indeed to anywhere in the Nordics – on tour last year, as our 2009 event kicked-off after many in the region had already exchanged the office for a campsite or a cabin on the coast. This year we managed to time our arrival in Stockholm for just before mid-summer, but the beautiful blue sky and sunshine here tell you that the summer solstice is not far away. Foolishly, I forgot to draw the blinds in my room when I fell into bed last night and was woken up by the bright northern summer daylight several hours earlier than I had planned to rise!

Also in Stockholm we welcome Brian Middleton to the tour. Brian leads Teradata’s EMEA Centre of Excellence for performance management and is a leading authority on the deployment of Teradata’s industry-leading mixed-workload management tool-set (Teradata Active Systems Management, or TASM to its friends). In Stockholm and at a number of the other venues on the tour, Brian will be presenting on best-practice TASM implementation.

Sweden, of course, is a country that has always exerted a strong cultural pull on the rest of Europe; from Abba through IKEA and H&M. And Swedish companies were among the first to embrace globalization wholeheartedly in the early 90s, quickly positioning themselves for global sourcing and selling.

Once you get to the city centre, you are struck by the beauty of this “Venice of the North”, which stretches across multiple islands. The first thing you notice is that they have actually managed to ban vehicles from large areas of the old town. Cars are for the countryside, which is sparsely populated in most parts. Maybe this is one of the reasons why the Swedish automaker Volvo traditionally puts so much emphasis on the safety and reliability of its products; Volvo were first, for example, to introduce anti-lock braking systems, energy-absorbing bumpers, crumple zones (front and rear) and many other safety innovations.

Early warning capabilities
Volvo was also one of the first major automobile manufacturers to realize the benefits of integrating fault, warranty and vehicle software configuration data - in a data warehouse running on Teradata, naturally. I have blogged previously about the potentials of data warehousing in quality assurance; a typical modern car has 60 or more on-board microprocessors and sensors, controlling complex mechanical functions that generally serve to improve driving performance, security, and stability. Examples are, again, anti-lock breaking and even more sophisticated capabilities like self-regulating engines that adjust their parameters if they detect a technical problem. All of these processors generate data and Volvo is able to capture and exploit much of these data, which are analyzed and mined to find patterns that coincide with malfunctions and to predict failure rates for individual components. Comparing actual failure rates with predicted failure rates early in the product lifecycle enables Volvo to identify “problem” components early, minimizing the cost and reputational issues associated with large scale recalls.

Future data applications
The benefits of Volvo’s analytical approach are not confined to matters of safety and reliability; in common with many in the rest of the industry, the company has an ambition to build cars that emit CO2 at much lower levels than is the norm today. In fact, its so-called “DRIVe” models are to emit less than 120g/km of CO2. Volvo collects diagnostic information from the entire DRIVe fleet to check the actual performance against this ambitious environmental objective, to understand whether consumers are actually able to achieve theoretical economies under “real-world” driving conditions.

In the hyper-connected “Internet of things” just around the corner, it could be that one day soon cars stream operating data back to manufacturer’s data warehouses in near real-time, supporting the sort of analyses that one major aero engine manufacturer currently performs on Teradata whilst the aircraft that its engines power are still in flight, so that replacement parts and personnel can be ready-and-waiting and preventative maintenance undertaken as soon as the aircraft touches down. Add this capability to GPS technology and the driver of the future might be guided to the nearest – or cheapest! - garage before her car breaks down. That could come in very handy – and not just for those lucky Swedes on their way to the coast for the summer next weekend.

Agility in Action

Sandra Worley — 6/10/2010

Earlier this week, Apple announced the June 24 release of the iPhone 4 giving my piggy bank reason to be nervous. The latest iteration will feature the ability to run multiple apps at the same time (an upgrade much in demand) and video-calling (something right out of “The Jetsons”).

Apple’s ability to deliver what consumers want—often before they know they want it—has been well documented. In a word, Apple is agile. And its agility in reacting to the shifting market demands leads to game-changing innovation, time and again. You can’t help but be impressed.

In the current issue of Teradata Magazine, we’re exploring corporate agility and ways any organization can achieve it by employing the right strategy and tools.

This video Take 5 features Tableau Software’s co-founder and Chief Development Officer Chris Stolte, who offers his keys to building an agile enterprise.

Now, if I can just get that piggy bank open, I’ll be able to view the rest of Teradata Magazine on a new iPhone.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Maybe I was Wrong or Tango 3.0

Paul Barrett — 6/9/2010

Last week I mentioned that Taipei was the most wired place on earth according to Wikipedia. But I think I was wrong… I have a new nominee:

Yes that’s my backyard, where I am writing this blog post – its Sunday Okay? I got out of the stuffy office. Our houses are becoming some of the most wired places on earth. Actually the most wireless. This picture was taken with my iphone from an app I downloaded wirelessly, then sent to my work e-mail wirelessly and then downloaded wirelessly – inserted into the blog and posted – ahem wirelessly.

About 10 years ago, I had a problem with my phone line and the service guy from Qwest came out. I had five phone lines, two personal landlines, a work landline, a fax and a dsl line. The guy looked at this situation and told me I had too many phone lines, I was using up all the line in the neighborhood – so the tech would just disconnect lines to see if anybody complained. My fault, I am sure.

A few weeks ago, while moving my office, I ripped out about 3 miles of twisted pairs (phone lines). Because I don’t have any local phone service anymore – it is all wireless. Except for the Comcast data line. And no more Qwest lines – even though I can see their sign from my front porch.

Funny story (apologies to my Qwest friends). Back then Qwest’s stock was around $80 a share. Now it is at $5.00 a share and they are being bought by Century telecom. And I am sitting in my backyard, with better connectivity on my PC and iPhone at the same time.

I bring this up because this is a data blog and I generated a bunch of data tonight for my Satellite provider. I paid my bill online, requested a credit for a movie that was all garbled via e-mail and ordered a new movie over the wireless network in my house through the set-top-box., all within 2 minutes (maybe less). As an old internet person, it blows me away. It also comes back to the network – the IP network, not the old POTS network (plain old telephone) which was amazing in its day ( The turn of the 20th century, not the 21st,)

As a digital marketer, it is fascinating. I had intense engagement with the company for a couple moments. Creating financial, marketing, customer service and product data in a burst. The data could be used so many ways – but it has to be orchestrated, analyzed and mined for value.

What kind of movies do I like? When do I pay my bills? What do I complain about? What is the best channel to reach me? All there created in a moment.

How does your company deal with these bursts of customer interactions? Are they valuable? Can you see patterns in the data? How is mobile access changing your business?

Answer these questions – and come to the webinar on June 15th with Teradata and KXEN’s brilliant Laura Squier. I will be Lou Costello to her Bud Abbot. Gracey to her George, Lucy to her Ricky...

Anyway, I think this has to change our ideas about how we see the world. For the past few years we have seen the web through the filter of HTTP – Hyper Text Protocol. But, we move so efficiently between the the web and other internet protocols we don’t even notice it. Mobile IP, Video IP, SMTP. The elegance hides the complexity for marketers.

We talk about click-stream, but that is a very narrow definition of data generated. As marketers, we need analytics from mobile apps, set-top-boxes, websites, social media and e-mail – all of which happens within seconds.

Which leads me to my second observation of the night – marketing is becoming more about orchestration than marketing warfare. The last marketing battle was warfare-like. Who could convert a visitor, who could get a click on an e-mail, who could get someone to answer the phone.

Now, the conversation and engagement slips effortlessly between technologies. The customer is leading and the pace is frenetic yet directed. Like the Tango.

Which completes the circle of this blog – in a way I didn’t imagine.

We are not involved in conversations with the customer, but in a Tango. We want them to buy, we use all our wiles and technology ( looks and steps) to create this environment. In the past this was dance like warfare, today it is about the give and take.

Plus – In this back yard I used to have a parrot (Senegal) named Tango by my wife.

And now I am listening to Tango 3.0 by Gotan Project

Lessons from the Hubble Telescope

Darryl McDonald — 6/9/2010

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.

Moscow, by night

David Placke — 6/9/2010

And so to Russia, via London to collect my visa. My trip was a little more eventful than I had hoped, since my outbound flight was delayed by so long that my connecting flight had already left for Moscow. My airline re-booked me onto another airline – a wholly owned subsidiary of the first – whose systems nevertheless could not recognize my e-ticket number, as they use a different coding system (anyone who thinks that Information Management is solved and that there is no reason to normalize, transform and integrate data in an Enterprise Data Warehouse, please take note!). Then when I got into the taxi at the airport at 2AM, the driver coolly announced that he had no idea how to find my hotel! Fortunately mobile GPS technology came to our rescue and I finally got to my bed in my hotel room just after 3AM local time.

The Beatles “Back in the USSR” happened to be playing on my iPod as we headed east into Russia. No longer as appropriate as it once would have been, given that the triumph of capitalism in the USSR is tangible everywhere in Moscow. But then last year’s road show was my first visit to the Red Square, and it brought about memories of the Cold War, mixed with the euphoria and relief we all felt when it ended. It’s funny how these things lurk in your mind until they come up again. Just like old songs.

The reality is that Moscow has become one of richest and one of the most expensive cities to live in during the last decade or so. About half of its 10 million inhabitants are regarded as nouveau riche or as members of the middle-classes. Last year Russia suffered from a deep recession, but the economy has been recovering and the Rouble has regained some of its strength. Russia is a strong growth market for Teradata and we have high hopes that we will announce more new customers here before the end of the year.

If the number and extent of traffic jams are a reliable indicator for prosperity (and I bet they are), then Moscow can’t be doing too badly at the moment. Here is empirical evidence that shows the jams (red) and the slow-moving traffic (yellow) in the metropolis. Last night at 2AM the traffic was not a problem, but I will be taking the train to the station this evening as we are operating on a very tight schedule - and 45 minutes in a traffic jam would mean another missed connection! And I really, really want get to my room in Stockholm before 3AM tomorrow!

My travelling companion, Teradata technology supremo Stephen Brobst, believes that essentially all vehicles will be fitted with sensor devices based on GPS technology that report their position and movement in the very near future. If that sounds either unlikely or Orwellian to you, then consider that most commercial vehicles are already equipped with this technology and that most of us already volunteer to carry cell phones that broadcast our location (and some of us then even use these same devices to post this information to Facebook and Twitter). That will potentially create some very interesting opportunities; for city authorities to manage traffic more rationally and respond to accidents more effectively; and for vehicle manufacturers to optimize the design of their products. By coincidence, the latest edition of Teradata Magazine has articles that describe the current state of the art in using detailed data to optimize both activities, as practiced by the Spanish government and by Volvo Cars (and no Volvo doesn’t track where you have been driving your car!).

Location or “geo-spatial” data is, of course, similar and also very different from traditional, “square” relational data, which is why we introduced new data types and new operators in V12 of the Teradata RDBMS. When most people think of location data they think of “visual mash-ups” that overlay the location of points of interest on a map. As cool as leading edge visualisation tools like Teradata partner Tableau are – and as important as this technology is for helping users to make sense of large numbers of data points – analysis of geo-spatial data requires computation. And efficient computation with location variables requires those native types and operators. Stephen is giving an elegant and articulate description of Teradata’s implementation of these concepts and their application to solving real-world business problems even as I write these words; don’t miss it when the Teradata CTO Road Show comes to a town near you during the course of the next couple of weeks!

Martin Willcox

Image Source:www.tripadvisor.com

Social Media, Profit, and the New Math – Who’s Making Money

David Placke — 6/8/2010

Oh yeah, this is one hot topic. Just about everyone that we speak with from communications to studios to gaming companies are madly focused on how to ring the register with social media today. It’s like a really fascinating math problem that everyone figures has an obvious answer but only a few can crack the code. Those who do figure it out however can buy Greece. Suffice it to say that there’s a lot of money to be made out there.

Google has definitely figured it out the equation and so has eBay; Facebook (FB) probably has too but we’re only speculating because they’re privately held and don’t share financials, Amazon still looks strong at the top line, but their lower margins are a challenge comparatively. MySpace; ouch. Then there are the Zynga types of the world who represent the promising young companies who might write their own formulas.

Let’s first look at how the new social media math for market capitalization works. Market cap by the way is recognized as a being a good representation of a companies net worth according to Wall Street. Stick with me on this.

Google is a great example. Last year, Google generated $24 billion of sales, an operating margin of 35.1% and added $6.5 billion to the bottom line. They also generated $8.5 billion in free cash flow. Nice. Google’s market cap sits at around $161 billion. Now watch this. Wal-Mart (WMT), now the 3rd largest company on the planet, generates 16 times the annual revenue that Google does, $400 billion a year. Their market cap is $189 billion, vs. $161 billion for Google. Not a whole lot different. How can this be?

Well for one thing, Wal-Mart generates 3.5 cents of net income for every dollar of sales when Google generates 27.6 cents of net income on a dollar of sales because of their fantastic business model. The other thing though is that Google sits at the center of the most promising market on the planet, social media, and they draw in mega millions of buying eyeballs every day. That’s the magic of the internet and also the massive allure of social networking. It’s the new business math of our time. Check out the May 2010 edition of the Harvard Business Review for a great story on how this all played out in Google’s IPO in 2004.

Are their others? Well take a look at Facebook who is the new social media darling. The Financial Times (FT.com) reported in March reported that Facebook has now overcome Google in popularity among U.S. internet users having scored more visits on its home page than the search engine. Facebook reports to having 400 million active users. Farmville, the popular FB application, alone has over 20 million players PER DAY. Location, location, location, they have it.

Financially, only a few really know how Facebook is fairing since the company is privately held and are secretive about such things. There’s pretty good evidence in 2008 they were not breaking even. But that was a long time ago in social media years. I’ve seen estimates that now place their revenue between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. Keep in mind that FB is still a young company only launched in 2004. I’m just guessing here, but am willing to bet that FB is now on the positive side of the ledger. We’ll all know once they announce for IPO. Such rumors persist, of course Facebook denies it. Are they the next Google?

Then there is MySpace, who is owned and deeply buried in the financials of their parent company News Corporation (NWS). MySpace is not in a terrible market space today but it’s not going in the right direction for them. They claim to host the “world’s largest music community” which is their bread and butter. Still, most analysts agree that MySpace is not fairing well compared to competition. Just ask your teenagers which site they prefer. No fancy statistics needed.

One more and then were out of here. Have you ever played with Farmville on Facebook, or how about Texas Hold ‘Em? Both were developed and are being marketed by a young company by the name of Zynga. Zyngas’ mission is to “connect people through games”. How cool is that? They were founded in 2007, and have approximately 600 employees according to their website. Zynga is privately held, but it’s been reported that the company generates in excess of $100 million in revenue. My guess is that it’s greater than that now because of the extremely rapid growth in the market. They have quickly become a formidable player in the online gaming space. Do they create a positive net income? Don’t know, but let’s keep a close eye out for them. They just signed a nice 5 year deal with Facebook and the IPO phrase is beginning to come up in same sentence as Zynga.

So there you have it. I didn’t get into Amazon or eBay in detail but I probably will later. Teradata has a close relationship with both of them and the stories are fascinating.

The role of business intelligence in all of this is huge. Think data, data and more data….combined with millions of global customers, dynamic products and rapid growth. Perfect.

I’m out of time for now. See you later, until then, enjoy and keep counting!

Paul Frangoulis

CFOs are using BI to manage resources and identify actions that increase success through more effective management decision-making

Ron Swift — 6/7/2010

Recently, Wayne Eckerson of TDWI published an outstanding piece of research titled: “How CFOs Use Business Intelligence to Turn Finance from Record Keepers to Strategic Advisors”.

Wayne is completely correct in his thoughtful outline of what YOU can do with this advanced way of thinking and acting to use BI effectively and profitably. Read this document, give it to your BI and DW Managers, and then provide it to your CFO. It enables a company to more clearly understand the benefits of integrating financial and related operational information from all sources.

Many CFOs have not deeply investigated the limitations of the accounting, general ledger, and/or reporting systems that they depend upon so heavily. They often focus on these systems’ capabilities with respect to providing regulatory and financial reporting. However, there is a significant ‘new world of finance’ that CFOs can tackle by leveraging BI and data warehousing to integrate data in a way that helps transform finance processes and related analytics. Exploration of these opportunities is usually left to I/T and BI professionals, who often have limited insight into financial data and the individual processes that generate it. As a result, many CFOs are looking to partner more effectively with I/T in an effort to leverage BI-related technologies in a way that provides finance and other decision-makers with information that is more current, more accurate, and more meaningful.

Eckerson summarizes his research into these categories:

Opportunity. The finance department sits at the information nexus of the organization. Finance can be a powerful agent of organizational change. It can leverage the information that it collects to assist executives and line of business managers to optimize processes, achieve goals, avert problems, and make decisions.

Obstacles. Most Finance departments are playing a back office role: they are forced to spend too much time producing internal and statutory financial reports, which leaves little time to analyze data and collaborate with business managers about how to improve the business. In the process of producing all these reports, finance teams create information silos, using spreadsheets and other low-cost tools that interfere with top executives’ ability to obtain a consistent view of enterprise performance.

Partners with IT. Forward-thinking finance departments have learned to partner with the IT department—more specifically, the business intelligence (BI) team—whose job is to manage information and deliver a single version of corporate truth. In so doing, they have liberated themselves from manual data collection and report production processes so they can engage in more value-added activities.

Business Intelligence. To succeed, the BI team must create a data warehousing environment that contains all the data that the finance department needs, with the appropriate rules and calculations already applied. The data must reconcile to the penny with operational reports generated from the general ledger. The BI team must also provide reporting, analysis, dashboard, and planning tools that access the data warehouse as well as other data sources and empower finance users to explore data on their own without IT assistance.

Growth Path. Once the BI team delivers a solid DW and BI infrastructure, the finance department can spend 80% of its time analyzing data instead of collecting it. They can work proactively with the business to forecast the future instead of report on the past. Armed with analytical insights, the finance department can collaborate with business managers to optimize pricing, reduce inventory, streamline procurement, or improve product profitability. They can help business managers evaluate options, such as whether to add more salespeople, change commission fees, partner with a new supplier, or change merchandising assortments, make new customer pricing, and build better multi-channel investments and operations.

There are several great examples recently, in many industries, where the DW/BI has worked closely with the financial team, to enable a vast new set of analytics and decision-making processes. Examples are:

Some Profitable Case Examples:

A very large telecom company, with ten of millions of customers, needed to separately analyze the business and consumer customer bases. Senior management required a more consolidated, transparent, and faster view of line of business performances. Through a joint effort the team created a new subscriber reporting system capturing daily changes through self-service BI views; created a 30-line subscriber-level P&L through a portal; automated key metrics which were manual; automated average revenue per subscriber data/reports; and now provides a single, integrated platform which feeds enterprise-wide, reliable metric calculations… all for faster and more accurate resource management and decision-making.
A large technology manufacturing company needed to implement a single data warehouse to achieve an easily synchronized, consistent view of company performance at any given point in time. The team determined that there was an excessive amount of manual labor and spreadsheet reliance for reporting and analytics – e.g. pricing decisions slowed by inability to integrate pricing, sales history, compliance metrics and CRM information. By consolidating and integrating financial information, the company can now quickly factor sales history and compliance behavior into product pricing negotiations and has also accelerated processes such as revenue reporting (now completed in minutes). By combining production, sales forecast and financial costing data, they can better identify which yield improvement projects will provide the highest return, generating $100 million in incremental annual gross margin. Through quick synchronization with the ERP system, they can now roll up consolidated financial data within minutes not hours.

The Benefits of BI-Finance Collaborations: A Great Future ….

As Wayne Eckerson notes in his report, the smart, collaborative use of BI and Data Warehousing for Finance can unleash capabilities many CFOs only dream of today:

Imagine a future in which the CEO calls a meeting of finance, sales, and other unit heads and their analysts and everyone agrees on revenue, profit, and cost numbers. Instead of arguing about whose numbers are right, the team spends the meeting identifying issues of concern, discussing options, and agreeing on corrective actions. Decisions are made based on facts, not gut feel, tradition, or arm twisting.
Imagine a CFO who checks the company’s overall profit and loss position daily and, with a click of the mouse, views the contributions of every region, group, and product line, and then drills down to view individual orders and expenditures at a product, customer, or supplier level. Armed with this information, the CFO alerts business unit managers to process and performance anomalies and suggests actions to remedy the issues.
Imagine a vice president of finance who can assess at a glance the company’s progress toward strategic goals at all levels of the organization and drill down to view the performance of any group, region, or area without IT’s assistance. To ensure various departments meet their goals, the VP requests that managers and staff in the field update plans and forecasts, which are automatically collected and consolidated within hours. The VP then works closely with department heads to tweak their investment strategies, hiring practices, resource allocations, process improvements, and other plans.
Imagine a controller who can automate the consolidation and standardization of financial transactions across a company in a few seconds and generate period-ending statutory reports in a few hours or days. The controller could reassign analysts who spend most of their time collecting, adjusting, and reconciling data to more value-added activities and confidently assure top executives that all financial reports are accurate and comply with pertinent regulations.
Imagine a financial analyst who can go one place to find all the information she needs to conduct an ad hoc analysis for an executive or who can generate a standard report without having to perform countless conversions using custom business rules and macros in unaudited and error-prone spreadsheets. The analyst could spend an extra two to three days a week helping business managers evaluate ways to optimize their operations instead of performing low-level data management tasks and proliferating spreadmarts that undermine information consistency.

Lastly, the convergence of data into meaningful information, the alignment of financial data with the power of DW and BI and the people who can enable better and faster knowledge discovery, is more than a dream in many organizations today. The imagination of the CFO will become the innovation of the corporation. And everybody wins. Let me know how you are thinking and performing this now!

Ron Swift

How many road shows?

David Placke — 6/7/2010

So we’re about to start our second CTO Road Show, after an exciting and exhausting debut in 2009! Over the course of the next several weeks, Teradata technology supremo Stephen Brobst and I will meet our customers and prospects in 11 cities throughout this ever-surprising old continent – assuming that the Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name behaves itself, of course!

I have to confess to a confused state of mind somewhere between a healthy degree of stage fright and reckless euphoria. Stage fright because my presentations are not yet ready (fortunately I have a long flight tomorrow to work on them) and because my Russian visa application has also not yet been processed (it is promised for first thing tomorrow, enabling me to just make my connection to Moscow); euphoric because of all the great memories from last year and all of the exciting new developments (geo-spatial and temporal data, social network analysis, etc., etc.) that we have to share this time.

Quite by chance, I noticed that the undisputed ‘poet laureate of rock ’n’ roll’, Mr. Bob Dylan is continuing his so-called never-ending tour and will be crossing our paths in June in Austria. (Although this would be most likely to happen at Vienna airport, and we would probably not even recognize someone who has so many faces.) Still I wonder what a conversation between two intense performers like Bob and Stephen would be like: How Many Roads, how many road shows – and how many philosophical questions could be rephrased as simple questions as Dylan does so elegantly in the song?

Dylan, of course, is neither the first nor the last of the great philosophers to remind us that we can discover fundamental truths by asking “how much?” and “how many?”. Numbers tell us basic truths – and far more precisely and succinctly than mere words can. Consider a study reported recently in the Economist: the strongest differentiator between subprime mortgage holders who defaulted and those who continued their payments during the recent US mortgage bust was – what? Level of income? Attitude to risk? No, it was their degree of numeracy that made the difference between Bring It All Back Home and Gimme Shelter. All of this is, of course, even more true for businesses. Companies have competitors, and part of the secret of success is to outthink your rivals, as Thomas H. Davenport puts it.

One of the best examples of companies that have put this strategy into practice is probably Apple Corporation. Steve Jobs & Co. have dominated an emerging market with the iPhone – despite the fact that other players, including incumbent device manufacturers, content providers and network operators - seemed to be in a far better position to do so. Apple’s market capitalization now exceeds that of Microsoft - and you could have got very long odds on that state of affairs back in 1997 when Apple was only saved from probable bankruptcy by Microsoft’s investment of $150M. As I have already written elsewhere on this blog, Apple is understood by insiders to have excellent insight into which of its product’s features appeal to their customers and to understand how much they would be willing to pay for specific enhancements. Also by coincidence, Apple’s World-Wide Developer Conference kicks-off this week and we can be sure that whatever bewitching announcements are unveiled there will be 5 parts Steve Job’s intuition mixed with 5 parts cold, hard, quantifiable market research.

Which brings me back to my own activities. During this road show, I intend to make more use of my iPhone and publish a few thoughts via Twitter – spontaneous questions or whatever crosses my mind and seems worth sharing. You can find my account here https://twitter.com/Willcoxmnk. I look forward to a lively discussion, please use #tdcto when referring to the CTO Road Show.

Bye for now!

Let’s Make a Deal

Patrick Hempton — 6/2/2010

A couple of weeks ago, my home computer’s DVD drive went kaput. After an ill-advised attempt to fix it myself, I was in the market for a new one.

Before heading to a big-box retailer, I went online to check out my options, comparing prices, in-store availability and shipping costs. In the end, I bought an external drive from a nearby store.

Such shopping behavior is not unusual. One IDC report indicates more than 70% of in-store purchases start online.

As a result, savvy retailers are collecting and analyzing their websites’ clickstream data for opportunities to close the deal with consumers who have abandoned their online shopping baskets.

One such company is J D Williams & Co. Ltd., the leading direct home shopping company in the UK. As Internet sales exploded for the retailer, it sought to better understand online behavior and influence it in real time.

To support this effort, the company deployed a Teradata Integrated Web Intelligence solution that leverages its data warehouse. This allows J D Williams to better understand why shoppers abandon their online shopping baskets, for instance, and market to them with targeted offers to try to close the sale.

To learn more learn, check out “Browsing for Internet Insight” at TeradataMagazine.com or listen to this podcast.

Both feature J D Williams CIO Neil McGowan discussing how his organization is seizing the opportunities that Web intelligence present.

Deeper insights are just a click away.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Most Wired Place on Earth

Paul Barrett — 6/1/2010

I recently spent a couple weeks working in Taipei – which according to Wikipedia is one of the most wired places on earth. I mention this because every time I brought up the slide with this comment and noting wikipedia as the source, the audience would laugh – and no one told me why.

But one additional fact that was astounding to me and my audiences was that Taiwan went from 250,000 Facebook users in April 2009 to over 6 Million in April 2010. In twelve months 30% of the population adopted a new communications channel. Aside from being remarkable it highlights a key challenge for marketers – how do you maintain a competitive advantage in a dynamic, rapidly shifting marketplace?

Mary Meeker April 2010 Internet Trends

View more presentations from guest1222bdb.

Back in the day, when I was doing CRM in telecom, we saw a similar shift – perhaps less rapid and pervasive. In long distance, the best profits were in international calling – suddenly e-mail started replacing long distance phone calls – or at least enough of them to reduce grow and flatten profits. So these shifts have meaning and consequences for marketers.

This is all the more relevant for me as I am preparing for a webinar with Laura Squier from KXEN, (Which I really hope you will join). The purpose of this webinar is how companies can keep up in this dynamically changing marketing environment. Using data and predictive analytics marketers can continually recalibrate there marketing decisions and investments.

One big challenge in the marketplace is marketing attribution. This is a big hairy problem for businesses because there is a growing number of media on which to put your message. But big questions remain?

Where should I invest my next dollar of advertising – TV, Local Print, Search Facebook, Direct Mail?
How do I attribute advertising to my sales. Sure, last click has been a default and under attack, but just looking at clicks and online ad placements is only a small part of the story.
How do different channels impact each other. Display ads Drive Search, but so do TV, product placements and local media. How do you manage your search budget when your other channels heavily impact search impressions?
What do all these changes mean for customer acquisition?
Does all this data help or overwhelm as you target offers?

We hope to address many of these questions in our webinar, but it would be great to get some input from you, as we prep.

Our perspective is that more data gives you options in how to approach the problems and to develop customized solutions that deliver a competitive advantage. Our perspective is also that data mining can deliver insight on developing opportunities by identifying changes in patterns, shifting relationships between data, customers and channel and emerging trends that could prove to be disruptive to acquisition, loyalty and revenue.

I would love to hear any comments or different perspectives that may be out there.

The Tower of Terror and the SEC

David Placke — 5/25/2010

“I’m not sure that this is a good idea”. Those were the words that I spoke to my 11 year old daughter when together we boarded the Tower of Terror ride last month at the Disney Magic Kingdom Theme Park in Orlando, FL. For those who don’t know, the Tower of Terror is a ride that’s made to look like an old haunted hotel in classic Disney style. Participants (un-expecting subjects), are squeezed into a small cranky elevator and slowly pulled up 5 stories of a scary hotel set in the early 1900’s. Then comes the good part, together you’re catapulted and dropped both unexpectedly and repeatable with almost no time to catch your breath in between. It also reminds me of my flight to LA last week but that’s another story. My 11 year old loved the ride. I had fun too but was glad when it ended. Let me just say that once enough for the Tower of Terror.

For many people in finance and IT, a visit or letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is something akin to the Tower of Terror. Most of you are aware of the official filings that the SEC requires of publicly traded companies, 10K, 10Q, 8K etc... The SEC and the investing public take these filings very seriously as they should because it’s here where companies formally document results and explain them to stakeholders. If the SEC, as the watch dog of such things, isn’t fully satisfied with the quality or depth of the filings then quite often they’ll follow up with an SEC letter asking the company for clarification or more supporting details. Actually, they’re not really “asking” they’re insisting. Each such correspondence requires an immediate and complete response that can take weeks and as a result thousands of dollars for a company to prepare and submit. The response has to be correct and defendable. As a side note, did you know that every letter of this type is available for public viewing on the SEC Edgar database? Just do a search in Edgar by company with the keyword of “CORRESP”. It’s kind of a cool thing to know if you don’t mind doing a little research to find out what’s going on behind the corporate scenes (or preparing for a meeting with the CFO).

The section of the filings that draw the most attention from the investing public is not necessarily the financial statements as you might imagine, but rather the Management Discussion and Analysis also the MD&A. According to the May issue of CFO Magazine (cfo.com; pg. 25) it’s also the section that’s at the of the SEC “Top 10 Concern” list. According to the article, the reason for the high level of concern is that the SEC really “wants more color in companies ‘description of operating results, their liquidity and capital resources, and how they develop critical accounting estimates”. The article goes on to say that “Companies are still struggling with making their MD&A’s a story and not a recitation of the financial statements,” quoting Bridgette Hodges, a Grant Thornton partner.

The reason this comes up in the context of business intelligence is simple. For years now, surveys of CFO’s have revealed that they want more operational data mixed in with financial data for reporting and analytics. Operational data such as customer orders, call detail records, ad sales information, Neilson data, micro transactions, customer demographics, supply chain data, number of sales people, etc… all lend themselves to explaining the why of the financial results which is what Wall Street really wants to understand. When armed with the business driver facts, the executives can better explain the story behind the numbers. Where is the best place to combine operational data with financial data for the purposes of analytics and reporting? You guessed it, in your BI environment.

It can be said that the Tower of Terror for a CFO is depicted in a situation where the information that’s needed to understand what really drove results is either not available or not understood. Some of the more advanced companies will say that this situation occurs if the information is not available in enough time to enable a directional change to alter the results otherwise. Either way investors rely on business leaders to provide the insight that they need to make a responsible investment decision. An inability to respond accordingly can turn into a real live terror ride that no one wants to take. The SEC will be there taking the ticket and operating the elevator.

The promise of business intelligence simply stated is to close the gap between the “what” and “why” of business. In a more advanced way BI can help us to determine cause and effect, and to project what could happen under given circumstances. In the real world, closing this gap is not always easy to do though. There can be many distractions and pitfalls along the way. Leave it to the SEC and others to tell us when we fall short. It’s a path that can be viewed either as a scary Tower of Terror, or as an opportunity to make your business better and your cause more effective. Which path are you on?

My goal with this blog is to share with you ways to better understand the business drivers behind the numbers. I’m not a professional writer by any means and barely have enough time to do this. I am mostly a road warrior out fighting the battles today along with you. But I think this topic is important enough to stop on occasion and report back to you regarding what I see working and not-working in the real world. Lessons learned along the way. We want to hear your stories as well. This is a safe forum for good ideas. Let’s share them. If I can do it then you can do it too.

I think starting this blog IS a good idea. I hope you enjoy participating in it.

Paul Frangoulis

On the Road Again

Sandra Worley — 5/24/2010

Summer travel plans are heating up now that Memorial Day is only days away. According to this month’s American Express Spending & Saving Trader, more than half of those surveyed say they are going to travel this summer.

Call it what you will—a destination vacation like a trip to the Grand Canyon, a “staycation” that’s closer to home or even a “mancation” for the guys-only adventure—summer travel can recharge the soul.

The travel industry—airlines, amusement parks, resorts—are keenly interested in where my time away from work may take me this summer. For instance, IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group), operator of more than 4,400 hotels worldwide, wants to know more about its customer segments. It wants to look at a guest and know how many times she’s stayed, whether she’s staying at the same hotel, and whether she travels to a particular destination or to different ones. And it wants to know that information quickly.

In the article “Room to Grow,” in Teradata Magazine, Beth Sexton and Sathish Gaddipati of IHG discuss how they were able to more quickly obtain that kind of information and how the company will use the data.

I won’t be staying at an IHG hotel this summer, however, when my travel plans take me to Nashville, Tenn. I’ll be attending a family wedding—and mooching room and board from them as well!

Ginny Wennen
Associate Editor
Teradata Magazine

Teradata Cares: On Target For Youth

David Placke — 5/24/2010

There are some who claim that the really important stuff at conferences goes on at the sidelines – well it certainly did at this year’s Teradata Enterprise Intelligence Summit in Berlin. Outside the keynotes, debates and discussions, we again focussed our interest on giving something back to the community that hosted us during the summit. Buoyed by last year’s success in Istanbul, we got the ball rolling in Berlin for Teradata Cares, our Community Relations Programme.

Most of our 720 conference participants couldn’t resist having a go once they spotted the goal-practice wall which we set up right in the middle of the conference centre. Hat trick or not - each attempt meant money in the collection box for Tannenhof Berlin Brandenburg e.V., a charity that offers addiction aid and helps to prevent young people from living their lives off-side.

Fair Play for a Better Future

The proceeds that resulted from the two-day goal-frenzy will now allow Tannenhof to run its prevention project “Young Football in Berlin – No Drugs, No Violence” until the end of the year. Within this project, Tannenhof arranges so called fair-play events for 12 to 15 year-olds. The idea behind it is to get youngsters off the street and to support them in making the right choices for themselves. Seemingly simple things like having a kick-about can help unlock unknown potential strengthen self-confidence and support team building, thereby making young people generally more successful in life.

This is also the intention of Teradata Cares. We want to support the communities we live and work in, to improve education and to help the environment.

So let’s keep the ball rolling!

Sandra Ertel

Partnership and Marriage

David Placke — 5/20/2010

I read somewhere recently that Teradata doesn’t marry well with an Oracle house. Now, that came as a big surprise to me – because Teradata is the Data Warehouse – the brains if you will - to the transaction platforms – Oracle, IBM, SAP or whatever ERP system our customers have – let’s call these the body (a match made in heaven some might say!).

Indeed, Teradata as an Analytical engine, a database platform built to enable the provision of insight to business consumers and applications, has to work with ERP and BI partners for our customers to be successful. Teradata and Oracle in particular have been long term partners in offering our joint customers a platform of integrated enterprise data, performance management and business intelligence (BI) tools, to improve their ability to make smart decisions. And we have the happy customers to prove it, in fact, Teradata itself is a major Oracle ERP user AND we use Teradata for the analytics.

Take CFO Topline article General Ledger Vs. Major Opportunity on how AT&T managed the (then) new Apple iPhone roll out of 4 million units in 200 days without skipping a beat – thanks to the business intelligence they were able to immediately access from the Teradata Data Warehouse. AT&T use Oracle ERP and Oracle BI to feed into and read from the Warehouse.

TDWI’ s report Transforming Finance: How CFO’s can use business intelligence to turn Finance from Record Keepers to Strategic Advisors asks readers to ‘Imagine a future in which the CEO calls a meeting of finance, sales, and other unit heads and their analysts and everyone agrees on revenue, profit, and cost numbers. Instead of arguing about whose numbers are right, the team spends the meeting identifying issues of concern, discussing options, and agreeing on corrective actions. Decisions are made based on facts, not gut feel, tradition, or arm twisting.’

They use joint Teradata and Oracle customers, AT&T and Office Depot as examples of how this can be accomplished when their finance departments ‘move beyond basic reporting to take advantage of dashboarding and scorecarding, as well as more sophisticated types of analysis, such as financial modeling and data mining.’ Going beyond daily updates to near-real-time information feeds enables an organisation to get things done, not waste time wondering what happened.

We’re pretty proud of what our customers are doing here in Australia and New Zealand as well as around the world – you only need to attend one of our conferences to understand that not only are we engaged with the different ERP solutions in our customers portfolio we are very much partners with our customers! Now that's one happy family.

We have a significant number of our customers who simplify an enterprise architecture for decision making by integrating Teradata into a landscape that includes all of the Application, Middleware, Business Intelligence and Data Integration providers you could think of. Taking this data, integrating, enhancing and provisioning it as necessary to enable business decision making is exactly what Teradata would put on our dating profile. Its what we do. Indeed its all we do.

Alec Gardner

Springing back into action

Darryl McDonald — 5/19/2010

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!

No Problem… I’ll Buy It on Amazon

Colleen Quinn — 5/19/2010

I live and die by the internet. I work remotely, and have loads of embarrassing evidence of angry confrontations with my spouse over *my* allegations of *his* abuse of bandwidth while we work from our home offices. (It’s never his fault, but I’m Italian, and we have tempers. We blame people. It’s in our blood.)

I buy my shoes online. I buy my son’s shoes online; and, his clothes; and, his toys; and, his books; and, our Equal for God’s sake (as we spend a lot of time in Europe, where the artificial sweeteners are rubbish).

I buy DVDs online too, for the most part—when I actually buy DVDs, that is. You see, as I live and die by the internet, our preferred movie viewing method-of-choice is streaming or downloading. But, we have a 4-year-old. And 4-year-olds alone might single-handedly save the physical media business. If you’re familiar at all with the media consumption habits of young children, you know that “repetitive” and “durable” are key benefits.

When I purchase DVDs, I occasionally buy them in the brick-and-mortar store, by the way. Take today, for example. I am passing through an airport and am in need of a present for the child to assuage my guilt over yet another business trip. DVDs work. I’m looking for a new release—Disney’s The Princess and the Frog-- but the title is not on the shelf. I rummage through the discount bin, find something for $5.99 (think Dora the Explorer, or the like), pay and off I go thinking, “No problem. I’ll buy it on Amazon.”

And with that last sentence, every executive working for a large content owner should cringe. This is a critical point of failure, lost revenue and lost opportunity for studios and retailers—and the out-of-stock problem happens every day.

The problem is an outgrowth of more than a decade’s worth of VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory)—where the studios have managed inventory for retailers using sophisticated processes and technologies. But, like almost everything else in the studio/content owner ecosystem these days, things have become more complex. I talk often about proliferation of digital media formats and channels—but the reality is, the same thing is happening in physical channels as well. Thanks Blu-Ray and BD Live—oh, and you too X-Box.

In a VMI relationship, optimizing demand and supply between the studios, distributor, logistics carriers, the merchandiser, and the retailer is the key to managing operational challenges. But, things break-down. And, when they do, the failures are costly. In other industries, like grocery and retail, leading trade organizations have reported that vendors experience 6% to 18% of their out-of-stocks for new items and promoted items.

Teradata’s studies show that retail industry stock-outs are between 5% and 8% and that overstock conditions – the result of poor forecasts and buys – continue to climb. This means that when people—like me—want to buy a specific new release title, it’s often not available.

From here, several scenarios can happen—all of them bad for your business, by the way. Option 1: I go somewhere else. The studio still books the revenue of the sale in that case—but it’s bad news for the retailer. Option 2: This is worse. Perhaps I don’t buy at all—a lose-lose for retailer and content owner. Finally, Option 3: This is just as bad. I get smart. I wait. And, in 30-days—when those critical two weeks for new release sales have passed—I march into a big box retailer, rummage through a stack of steeply marked-down titles, and pick my choice at a discount thanks to lots of overstock..

I’m sure you’re thinking that this supply chain stuff is some of the most riveting material you’ve read in weeks. It is! And, there are far smarter people than me talking about the impact of out-of-stocks—and the steep revenue losses they cause. I’d encourage you to check out the Global Supply Chain Forum taking place on May 25, 2010 at Stanford University, where multiple industries, including Media & Entertainment, are coming together to talk about how to manage and improve costly supply chain issues like this.

I assure you—and if you’re in Home Entertainment you know—that this is a real issue for content owners, studios and their retail partners who often get one crack at capturing full-price for DVDs. So, what’s the solution? For starters, VMI needs to take a leap forward and enable detailed forecasting where the rubber meets the road: at the store and SKU level; forecasts which take into account subtleties that drive performance-- they recognize historical performance, are deep in seasonal and causal identification and respond automatically to the latest trends. It’s possible. We know because Teradata’s Demand Chain Management Solution does it, saving customers bundles in the process.

That doesn’t do the retailer whose shop I just left any good at the moment. I still didn’t get what I needed, though my guilty conscience is cleared thanks to a cheaper second choice. One thing’s for sure—I’ll just buy it on Amazon.

Colleen Quinn

*Image Source - Amazon.com

How to extract intelligence from social networks

James Lopez — 6/2/2010

We are still in the aftermath of the Berlin conference, it seems, where one of the hot topics was “integrated web analytics”, which has reached a new dimension with the success of social networks like Facebook. The ongoing debate has resulted in a podcast produced during the conference that is now available online. I was quite impressed to hear that the data volume generated by micro-conversations that took place on these networks in the year 2009 alone was higher than the volume of all the data stored by humankind before.

In this podcast, Christian Howes of Webtrends and my Teradata colleague Paul Barrett discuss exactly what kind of data social networks produce and how this data can be used for the purposes of business intelligence or customer relationship management. On the one hand, people spend more and more time within environments like Facebook, which is increasingly becoming an application platform. In other words, people are not just socializing there – they are actually making transactions and will make even more in the future (shopping etc.). This turns social networks into a key place to engage with customers.

As much as brands were wondering how to engage their customers on the web in the 90’s, they are now wondering how to engage their customers on facebook. And building a ‘like’ area on facebook is quickly becoming as important as it was to build a website when the internet appeared.

Once a brand is present, she needs to be able to extract this data and put it into a meaningful context, hence, integrated web analytics. There is very interesting work being done on this, with lots of opportunities lying ahead. So do listen for yourself.

Edouard Servan-Schreiber

Speed and performance

Patrick Hempton — 5/11/2010

Every year, I get hyped up waiting for the Kentucky Derby. I’ve never ridden a horse, but as I watch the derby, I imagine the thrill of those magnificent animals thundering around the course at breakneck speed, each jockey coaxing his horse around the other contenders in the run for the roses. The race itself takes only about two minutes, which in horse years would probably be about 10 weeks. However, the sheer speed, strength and agility of this year’s winner—Super Saver—were magnificent to watch as jockey Calvin Borel masterfully guided the 2-year-old colt to victory.

Borel is already predicting Super Saver will take next weekend’s Preakness Stakes and also finish first in the June 5 running of the Belmont Stakes to become the first Triple Crown winner since Affirmed in 1978. My bet is he’s the pony to sweep ’em.

Agility is key to winning—and succeeding. An agile organization is one that can quickly gather business intelligence (BI), nimbly act and react, take advantage of changing conditions, and move forward with strength and power. Any company operating in today’s knowledge-based economy needs to remain agile, particularly now that corporate disclosure requirements have become tougher.

In the article “Agility, Transparency, Velocity” in Teradata Magazine, author Bill Tobey writes, “A multitude of internal and external stakeholders are taking a much more assertive role in corporate oversight, and management must prepare to report against a widening range of financial and operational performance standards.”

Performance on a muddy track or in a hushed boardroom can mean the difference between victory and defeat. Agile organizations can break out of the gate and race through corporate disclosure requirements through their effective use of technology, and some prodding from their own jockey’s whip.

Ginny Wennen
Associate Editor
Teradata Magazine

Flash forward

Patrick Hempton — 5/4/2010

In a surprising move last week, Sony announced it would cease to produce 3.5-inch floppy disks. Why was this surprising? I thought they were discontinued years ago. Who’s still buying them?

It seems like a millennium ago that I got my first desktop without a disk drive. It was a blueberry-colored iMac. I lamented to a co-worker its lack of a handy floppy drive to transfer files. He pulled out a USB drive on his keychain. I don’t think I’ve given the floppy disk another thought since.

The flash drive was and is vastly superior. It’s faster and stores more data. The same technology powers the solid-state drive (SSD), which delivers superior speed, storage and efficiency over traditional hard disk drives (HDDs).

“An SSD device uses 40% less energy than an HDD. And one SSD can achieve the same total performance output as 20 HDDs, thereby significantly reducing drive counts and saving significant amounts of energy and valuable data center floor space,” explains Teradata Platform Marketing Manager Jim Dietz in his upcoming article “Leave fast in the dust.” The piece, available from Teradata Magazine Online in late May, goes on to explain the capabilities of the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance, which is powered by SSD technology.

In the meantime, there’s more on SSDs, in our Q4 2009 articles, “Solid State Storage 101” and “Solid State Storage 201.”

And for all those still holding onto a cache of floppy disks, they make great coasters and have potential as decorative tiles.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Returned home safely?

David Placke — 5/3/2010

It was on April 14th, the last day of our Berlin conference, and more than 2,000 kilometres windward that the volcano Eyjafjallajokull erupted on Iceland. (So don’t tell me that we haven’t had an impact.) In the following days, country by country Europe shut down its airports because it was feared that the volcanic ash cloud would damage aircraft engines. Germany didn’t close its airports till April 16th, so there is a good chance that most of you did manage to get off the ground on time.

When you were seeing all those stranded passengers (on TV, I hope), were you thinking what I was thinking? With more and more flights cancelled on an hourly or daily basis, there must have been a lot of booking and rebooking going on. I dare say that several data warehouses were seriously strained last week. In the media, it was reported that, after the restrictions had been (partly) lifted, some stranded passengers waiting for their return flights were not given priority over new passengers who arrived for outbound flights. Obviously, data warehousing cannot solve the fundamental problem here – it can neither make a bottleneck disappear when there aren’t any planes flying at all nor can it give courageous passengers clearance for take off. Still, I am convinced that airlines’ decision support systems make a noticeable difference in their ability to keep customers happy in such a situation.

There is another aspect which I found equally interesting. Some airlines criticized governments for shutting down air traffic solely based on meteorological simulations rather than real (measured) data, which were not so easy to get. So how would you have decided, given that you only have incomplete information at your disposal? I still remember our little philosophical debate about the proper role of intuition in Berlin. Also, my colleague Eric Joulié made a similar point on this blog, arguing that the better our simulations become, the more we are tempted to mistake them for the real world. I think the airlines’ criticism highlights once again that decision support and decision making are not quite the same.

I hope all of you have returned home comfortably. Thank you to all the attendees and speakers for your participation, and thanks to all the members of the Teradata team that help to make this conference happen.

Clicks tell the story

David Placke — 4/28/2010

I had the opportunity last week to present to a group of digital marketers at the Webtrends Engage 2010 conference in Sydney. I was impressed by the passion the audience had about their online domain. Listening to the challenges of driving customers to their web sites along with content management was a new world for me and what I liked most was the enthusiasm they had around analytical decision making.

Digital marketers seemed to live in a world that that promotes experimentation, and relies heavily on measurement; needless to say these are my kind of people!

The biggest surprise that I had was how siloed their world of data is, focused only on online data (click stream). Interestingly, most of the organisations that I work with do not have access to the click stream data in their warehouses. This is a marriage waiting to happen; its time that the offline data world comes together with the online data world, the power of integrated data is waiting to be exploited.

Organisation’s that are bringing these data sets together are driving a greater understanding of their customers needs and desires, relevant information is being served up to customers as they browse the web and conversations are standardised across channels. The customer is starting to see one organisation, how does your customer see you?

Daniel Tehan

Sorry I’m Late, Boss—Blame the Volcano. A True Story of One Woman’s Need for Real-Time Data. Now.

Patrick Hempton — 4/27/2010

This blog was supposed to be about the launch of Twitter’s new ad service, albeit belatedly. I also considered talking about Gawker’s coup this week, paying a handsome sum for a forgotten Next-Gen iPhone left-behind in a bar. But, let’s get real. These things aren’t top of mind for me right now.

Why? Because I am two-hours into a journey that won’t conclude for at least another 60-hours. Imagine the joys of spending 14-plus hours on some combination of cars, buses, trains and boats (yes, boats) with a typically temperamental 4-year-old child in an effort to get from one country to another, just to be able to catch a flight (two-days-later) to your home country. This is the plight, it seems, of half of Europe thanks to an unpronounceable volcano whose ash has shut down much of European airspace. But, who cares about those people. This is my plight—that’s all I care about right now.

So, off we go. After waiting a week to confirm if our original flights from Finland—where I had some cool Teradata business, before heading off to our Teradata Universe event in Berlin and back—might take off, we’re tired of the eternal limbo. Every day there is the promise that tomorrow—yes, just tomorrow—we will have the window to leave. But, that window never comes. Our next best option? The current carnival of transportation spanning many, many, many hours to get to Riga, Latvia-- where the bold Eastern Europeans are happily thumbing their noses at EuroControl and launching flights into ash-filled air—will theoretically put us on the soonest “guaranteed” flight to get us the hell out of here. (Personal Note: We love Finland. We have amazing family there—and if you’re reading this, thank you for your free basement and food!)

So, what does our travel misery nee adventure have any business being posted on a supposed technology blog? I’ll tell you that too. I spend my life—at least a large chunk of it—preaching the values of integrated, real-time data. And, I’ve seen the value first-hand. I’ve seen organizations achieve real business change through real-time response to customer and operational needs.

At Teradata, we talk a lot about one of our favorite airline customers—Continental Airlines-- who, by using our technology to track their best customers and anticipate travel delays or available perks, proactively greet those customers at the gate (or via email, mobile phone etc.) to communicate such changes, and aggressively offer solutions. The best customers are treated that way—because this airline knows who they are and where they are in real-time. This incredibly personalized, proactive and problem-solving approach relies on real-time synchronization of in-flight, arrival and departure data, fully integrated with customer travel itineraries, frequency of travel, and preferences.

This utopia of airline progress—thanks to data integration and effective CRM—is a far cry from our desperate clamoring for information of any kind. We can’t even begin to enumerate the challenges, but let me hit the top two:

What Happened: A complete absence of consistent communication from any source had us guessing where to go, when and what would happen. EuroControl data informed us certain airports were open and functioning; those same airports communicated that they were closed; and our airline fell on both sides of the fence, either offering no conclusion, or dividing their opinions depending on who we spoke to. I acknowledge that some of this is due to an incredibly fluid and unprecedented set of circumstances.

What SHOULD have happened with Real-Time Data: Imagine the benefits to everyone: air traffic control, airlines, airports and passengers if there were centralized access to a single consistent set of information and status. It’s possible. We might not have left any sooner, but we would have been able to make realistic plans about what our options were. And, we would have saved hours on the phone, multiple trips to the airport, and several teary good-byes.
What Happened: Delayed or absent communication of information that WAS known. We’re efficient technology people. We checked the above sources online regularly. But here was the rub, our airline, whose phone IVR pleaded with us to “check the website” published updates on flight status every 4-6 hours, often longer! And, they offered no advanced indication of flights pending the following day (even when airports, like ours, were already broadcasting they would be closed the following day). More egregious? When we failed to find ANY information on-line, and finally connected to a live agent (after something approaching an hour on hold), we were told to “just go to the airport.” That would be the closed airport. We spent hours on hold, hours searching online, and only as a last resort, decided that our best chance was to hustle to another major city that seemed more stable.

What SHOULD have happened with Real-Time Data: See, there are these things called “mobile phones” – recent invention. Amazing devices. They have this function called “SMS.” Would it be SO unfathomable to text updates to passengers with flight-specific details, even as that information is changing rapidly? When we made our flight reservations, we provided these details and opted-in to SMS communication alerts. We didn’t receive a single SMS update. Not one. Alternatively, some blanket statement of process, apology and vague details via email would have been better than nothing. What about just leveraging the flight data available and integrating that with the web-site, making available, though shifting, information available. We understood the situation was fluid—but, knowing what was happening was preferable to knowing nothing at all.

There have been positive examples. Finnair, for example, managed to half-fill a jumbo-jet on just two-hours notice for their primary long-haul journey from New York to Helsinki. They were given a narrow window during which the sky would open, they aggressively contacted customers (via SMS and email) in the New York-area who were known to be waiting, and offered the best they could: you get here in two hours, we get you on the flight. It was a heroic task in New York traffic, but many made it, and were grateful for the chance. Even that story leverages only a fraction of what’s possible when companies evolve their information technologies into enterprise, real-time environments.

So, upon completion, we’re nearing seven-hours in transit. So far so good. Let’s just hope that the flight we’re hoping to catch does in fact exist. But, trust me when I tell you, our airline will be the last to know. And, I promise, that Twitter blog is coming soon.

Useful information

Sandra Worley — 4/22/2010

After all of the hype about the importance of answering and returning this year’s US Census Bureau’s survey of households, I was eager for the actual document to arrive. When if finally landed in my mailbox, I opened it with great anticipation and quickly answered the few questions on who I am, who else resides with me, and what I do for a living. This kind of information helps decision makers determine how many schools need to be built, what roads need improvements, and what impact this baby boomer is going to have on our healthcare system.

Operational business intelligence (BI) also supports decision making on many levels—only faster. For the past several years, the goal has been to take the data that is produced in the back office and push it to front-line employees in a form appropriate for their job functions. This enables them to quickly make those countless decisions that can add up to success or failure for a company. Such functions include inbound and outbound cross-selling by customer service reps, point-of-sale fraud detection, and work force scheduling, just to name a few.

More and more organizations are adopting operational BI, according to a BeyeNETWORK report, “Operational Business Intelligence: The State of the Art” written by Judith R. Davis, Claudia Imhoff and Colin White. The 2009 survey found that 80% of BI users were evaluating, deploying or planning operational BI. To learn more about this growing trend, check out the highlights of the report in By the Numbers at Teradata Magazine Online.

Knowing that BI is becoming easier to collect, disseminate and be put to good use, I had to ask myself: Why does the government still bother to mail out a printed census form? Couldn’t they just direct me to a website so that I could electronically contribute my personal head count information?

Ginny Wennen
Associate Editor
Teradata Magazine

Teradata recognition as an ethics leader translates to trusted leadership

Darryl McDonald — 4/20/2010

Most of us know that Teradata has attracted a lot of positive attention through awards and analyst rankings. In addition, our customers are often recognized for their innovation and achievements in using Teradata systems. On our own signature terms, we are committed to raising intelligence – through our data warehousing technology, analytics expertise, professional services and industry consulting – areas where we lead.

You probably saw our company news release: Teradata was just named one of the world’s top 100 most ethical companies by The Ethisphere Institute, a think tank that evaluates the operating details of thousands of organizations.

So now we’ve now found another way to lead: by raising ethical intelligence. This important recognition differentiates us as the only database management system (DBMS) company so honored. It translates to being the DBMS company that businesses can trust.

This is powerful. It reflects on our business yet specifically on the way we do business – with customers, partners, suppliers – and the many constituents with whom we interact. We’ve continued to lead in the business categories most important to us – and now we are a leader among peers in a category that is just as much personal as it is business: trust.

I like the way the Ethisphere Institute described their select winners list companies: “These companies go beyond legal minimums, introduce innovative ideas benefiting the public, and force their competitors to follow suit.” I’d like to add: “… while promoting relationships of trust.”

Teradata employees can be proud: we lead the way in promoting ethical business standards while introducing innovative products and ideas that benefit public well being. We set high standards for competitors and other companies to strive for; deliver on corporate citizenship and social responsibility commitments; and have established a pervasive corporate culture and tone that reinforces ethics and integrity at all times.

Intelligence is doing the right things, and doing things right. In a world where trust and intelligence seem to be in short supply, I am proud to work with such a team – a great company that keeps finding new ways to lead.

Why don’t they [IT] ever learn?

rita zimmerman — 4/16/2010

I was chatting with friends last weekend about work and the conversation led to discussing how hard IT seem to make things for users "STILL". As an ex-CIO who started out as an analyst/programmer in the mainframe days – I appreciate the need for controls (security, data quality etc) but we have come such a long way; from the white coat "lab rat" days, to having developed so much enabling technology for users which makes life easy for both business and IT.

The conversation started with my friend, the business analyst who works in a government agency, complaining how hard it was to not only get access to the data in their data warehouse (which is why it was of interest to me) but also to make corrections to information published on the departmental web site. Here’s the saga:

ISSUE 1: SOURCING THE RIGHT DATA

The source data is provided to the department by external agencies to meet reporting requirements (presumably an extract from their operational systems). This data is loaded and transformed into the data warehouse by IT (so far so good), and while the business users are consulted on the transformation rules and what data is needed by them to do their analysis/publications, it unfortunately isn’t always effective. Getting this step right is critical for the ongoing trust and reliability of a data warehouse by end users.

Interestingly, having only just completed a Data Warehouse Maturity Assessment (or health check) for a customer, an observation by their business was that, when developing and implementing an application no one [in the project team] asks the business what their future analytic needs are. It was identified by an executive as something that maybe they should start doing for all projects.

ISSUE 2: DATA LINEAGE

OK – so if the data isn’t quite what it should be then at least it can be corrected! Right? WRONG – the source data isn’t even retained! [My jaw dropped on this one in disbelief.]. Can you imagine pleading with the external agencies for another copy just so you (the business analyst) can have the correct set of data supporting a public web site? With disk space so cheap, let alone business being able to justify publication data, I couldn’t understand why an original copy of data isn’t retained. What auditor let that process omission through to the keeper?

ISSUE 3: DATA FRESHNESS

Anyway, after much begging, trial and tribulation and a number of weeks later, my business analyst has the tables with the correct data ready for uploading onto the web site. Their unit is responsible for the published data but getting the data published is IT’s responsibility and they then have to deal with another area of the Department creating further delays. Bear in mind, this is a public web site with inaccurate data. Instead of providing tools to the business owner to be self serving so they can upload the data, they even changed the formats for delivery to IT from Excel to a standard CSV file. Seems reasonable, but since the original file was loaded using Excel which can have multiple tabs it also seemed reasonable that the reload could be done using the original format as converting from multi-tab to a single tab is very time consuming and has the potential to introduce inaccurate data. Just another road block and delay and it seems "just because" they can demand it.

ISSUE 4: IT PROCESS

At this point another friend comments, "I know what you mean". He has a small business selling a software product that is usually loaded into existing client data bases and often integrated with other client systems. He said that if the business user (the buyer) makes a comment when told of the data base/server/network requirement, "no problem, we get on well with our IT" then the installation is usually a smooth one. If the client makes negative comments about their delays in dealing with IT, it is a warning that just getting the system loaded and up and running (a straight forward half a day job) will inevitably be delayed and create major bottlenecks to the business etc.

ISSUE 5: ACCESS TO DATA

By now my analyst friend was on a roll – still more challenges. Apparently, another group was enquiring as to what they needed to do to get access to their data and were told by IT "we can put it into cubes for you" to which my friend replied "good luck – don’t expect anything for about 6 months" mainly because the cubes are in development and not ready for user access. This last response is so common it’s sad. A common bottleneck for users of a data warehouse is limiting direct access to the data. Fair enough for end users who just want the data fed to them, either as a fixed report or through a parameter driven self service portal. The power user, on the other hand, should be given access to the data warehouse for their ad hoc analysis and avoid the need to wait for controlled cubes.

PEOPLE – PROCESS - TECHNOLOGY

At this point I was a tad irritated – why don’t they learn? 40 years ago things did take a long time, IT controlled how and what computers (the computer) did in an organisation – and we were accused of being hard to communicate with. I always wanted to be proud of the systems I delivered. In fact, how many times did you see in the newspapers when there was a 'glitch' - "it was a computer error" [technology] when you knew full well it was the human! [people and/or process] Grr….

But today there is no excuse – most people are computer savvy and expect to be able to use tools to be self sufficient – like being able to load data to a web site that you are responsible for – and power users exploring the data itself. Security, protocols, monitoring tools etc exist to protect data and enable access not to create major impediments for authorised business users, BI tools and data warehouses can (and do) support self service and rapid/agile deployment. They also free up the IT staff to do much more value adding 'cool stuff' rather than loading data or building a cube for someone else. Many of our customers can proudly say "our Teradata data warehouse delivers the right data, in the right time, to the right people – quickly."

If you are reading this and have a similar complaint about your data warehouse, or if you have a good data warehouse and want to do more – then I suggest it’s time for a health check. Find out where you can make improvements in people (skills), process and technology. IT is an enabler for, not a constrainer of (that’s the purview of your imagination and budget!) delivering business value.

A busy final day in Berlin

Jamie Flynn — 4/14/2010

After three intensive days, this conference is coming to an end now. Apart from the pleasure of meeting so many friendly faces who share an interest in our discipline, I am enjoying the feeling that I have once again gathered a multitude of fresh ideas – or should I say, loose ends – that I will take home and reflect upon. And I hope you feel the same way. Here are just a few thoughts on today’s keynote and workshops.

Stephen’s bid for the BICC
Stephen Brobst, Teradata’s CTO, made a strong case for the concept of the BI competence centre (BICC) that would serve as a link between IT and business users. The idea is to say good-bye to the project-based implementation approach and form permanent teams with experts from both sides. “Good plans are not set in stone. They embrace change, and don’t prevent it,” he said. The BICC would spread analytical skills and best practice examples throughout the enterprise, and quickly identify new business information needs and find their solutions. This entity would define standards and the overall BI architecture – but more importantly, it would adjust the BI environment to business users’ preferences and requirements, not vice versa.

Healthcare workshop
There was also the healthcare workshop that we set up together with SAS. Jürgen Kellermann and Matthias Kleinschmidt of GKV Spitzenverband, a German association of statuary health insurance based here in Berlin, gave us some insight into the good work both they and their members do. Apparently, they do not only have to make extra sure that they comply with privacy regulations – there is also the competition among its members that they have to take into account. Still, they manage to establish meaningful benchmarks and produce figures that serve as a valuable basis in negotiations with the medical associations. In other words, even in a highly sensitive environment, there is leeway to examine anonymous health data for opportunities to cut costs and increase medical effectiveness. Which is good news considering that practically all healthcare systems (in the Western hemisphere, at least) face similar problems.

Automotive podcast
As for our special automotive track at this conference, I am sorry that I couldn’t find the time to cover it. From what I hear, it has been a very productive encounter of two (up to now) distinctive cultures, engineering and IT. On the one hand, data analysis has already been a common method among engineers, for example in quality assurance. On the other hand, the enterprise-wide approach that Teradata adheres to means: First, that there are many other valuable data warehousing applications for the automotive industry, for example in supply chain management or CRM. Secondly, this leads to more available data, such as reported early warranty cases, opening up new analytical opportunities in quality management. As for the latter, this podcast with Duncan Ross explains the potentials.

Remember the Marauder’s Map?
Finally, just one more remark. I remember that last year, during the Istanbul conference, I was formulating the vision of some kind of Marauders Map on our smart phones that maps the marvels of the city we’re in adjusted to our individual preferences and social networks. Judging from what I have seen on the smart phones of our participants, we have already come halfway here. There is no shortage of apps that help you to find your way through a city you don’t know. As for the analytical part which is necessary to further customize this information, I am sure that we will see a lot more in the future.
For now, let me thank you for your participation. I hope you found this conference as inspiring as I do. I wish you all a safe and comfortable journey home.

Facing and embracing a changing world – with sneakers and energy

Jamie Flynn — 4/14/2010

If I had to sum up what I’ve learned at yesterday’s Teradata Enterprise Intelligence Summit, it would probably go like this: the world is changing and that’s OK, as long as we respond accordingly. Geoff Burch claimed that managers need to notice when their staff are doing things right – one of the basic rules of motivation. But how do you empower people to get things right in the first place? Hermann Wimmer’s answer during the closing session: By handing them the information they need. He made an impassionate plea: “Set information in your organization free so that every decision is a smart decision”.

The eagerly awaited keynote of Joschka Fischer, the former Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany, was equally passionate. I love the story of Joschka Fischer wearing sneakers at his inauguration as the first minister of the German green party in 1985, which my German colleagues told me. Pretty bold in a surrounding that couldn’t be any more formal! In addition to making a fashion statement, wearing sneakers also demonstrates a dynamic and forward-looking mindset. It seems to me that Fischer started a trend with it. Or do you still find it odd that Steve Jobs always gives his famous presentations wearing sneakers.

Apart from his forward-looking “sneakers-attitude”, Fischer is also known for being a strong advocate of environmental protection. That doesn’t mean he longs for pre-industrialized times, he rather embraces high tech as part of the solution. You could have heard a pin drop when Fischer drew an impressive picture of the ongoing shift in power from the Western countries to the emerging new economic powerhouses in Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. At last, billions of people are reaching a decent standard of living through progress in society and technology – and that is definitely a good thing, a dream coming true! There are downsides to this development however. They include shortages in energy and water supply as well as worldwide environmental pollution and climate change – quite severe consequences. Fischer’s conclusion: Since we only have one world, the challenges of this century can only be managed if all mankind act as one, which so far has never been the case. Waste of resources, especially energy, must come to an end quickly, because we are definitely running out of time. Instead, we urgently need to make energy supply more efficient and to enforce the adoption of renewables.

We at Teradata share this view. And we strongly believe that data warehousing is indispensible here. The “smart grid”, for example, would not work without a precise and dynamic, real-time picture of the electricity networks. The same applies if you want to give your customers an opportunity to find out about the carbon footprint for, let’s say, flying from Milan to Berlin, and to choose the “greenest” option accordingly. In addition to saving energy and enabling ecologically responsible decisions, data warehousing also makes energy supply more reliable. After all it is, in a way, a long supply chain, in which you need to forecast demand and order pre-products timely and accurately, for example. This is definitely one field in which advanced analytics will play a crucial role in the next ten years.

One in four organizations have adopted real-time intelligence

David Placke — 4/13/2010

Roughly one in four companies in Europe use active data warehousing (ADW), i.e. timely information in at least one of their front-line operations. That’s one of the findings of a new IDC whitepaper we discussed with journalists and several of our guests yesterday afternoon. This means that the bulk of businesses still works without real-time decision support. Why is this? Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst’s guess is that some industries simply are not as competitive as Teradata’s traditional markets yet, namely retail, telecommunications and finance.

In the longer run, analytically capable players outperform those who rely on gut decisions, Brobst said. This led his colleague Judy Bayer, Teradata Director Advanced Business Practices for EMEA, to observe that she considered herself to be a highly intuitive person: “Intuition takes information into account. The question is not whether you decide upon your gut feeling or pure reasoning. The question is whether you have full information at hand.” There was also a little ambiguity about the distinctive definitions of data and information. According to Daniel Neuhaus, head of business intelligence and data warehousing at Swisscom (Schweiz) AG, the former clearly is the raw material, the latter the result of interpretation – which in turn Alys Woodward Program Manager, European BI and Analytic Applications of IDC referred to as “intelligence”.

The coming quantum leap
Martin Willcox then steered this increasingly philosophical debate back to the typical application fields of active data warehousing and their future potentials. He made it clear that the technology is about to take a quantum leap with the integration of solid state drives (SSD) in Teradata platforms, as announced last October in Washington. SSD makes data available “at the speed of light” so that the most time-consuming task in data warehousing, namely searching and preparing the relevant data, is dramatically accelerated.

The benefit: faster response times and more complex, sophisticated real-time analyses. And this, again, opens up whole new horizons of applications. Let me give just one example from the utilities: electricity providers have to meet energy demand at all times. Which requires certain reserves that inevitably lead to overproduction and waste. If the provider could forecast the demand accurately at very short intervals, however, unneeded energy could be sold to other providers at short notice (or bought from them if demand rose unexpectedly). In other words, SSD technology will enable providers to make full use of their smart grid data. At the same time, the utilities are one of those industries where we expect increasing competitive pressures in the coming years – the primary driver of ADW adoption.

A “digital divide” in decision support?
Growing platform performance and new analytical opportunities – these two things seem to be working hand-in-hand. The IDC whitepaper, however, raises the question whether there is some kind of “digital divide” emerging in enterprise analytics where leading corporations give their front-workers access to the latest, ever more complex data (and thus meaningful information), while their competitors are dramatically falling behind.

Charles-Yves Baudet

Business as a Lifestyle - Analytics as a Corporate Lifestyle

Paul Barrett — 4/13/2010

I was driving out to the Denver Airport this morning well before dawn and saw a spectacular early morning moon rise. The moon hung like a giant orange crescent being lit by the sun that was still an hour below the horizon. It was truly spectacular and I snapped a picture while drove and completely failed to capture it.

But Hey, I was driving so cut me a break…

The reason I was heading to the airport so early on a Sunday was to go to Berlin for the Teradata Universe Event. We have quite a few customers who are focusing on integrating online and offline data and I am excited to hear them speak.

Another reason I may not have taken the greatest picture in the history of the world is because I was also listening to a very interesting interview on the BBC. Peter Day was interviewing an American Professor about how some companies have thrived and others struggle to survive as the relationship with the customer is changing. One company he mentioned was Sony that owned the mobile music marketplace – and other categories only to see Apple just take it away with a networked product strategy. There was an excellent article about Sony in the last Wired.

Another company they discussed was Harley Davidson. Harley considers itself a lifestyle company – and has built its brand, selling and service around the lifestyle of its customers. Competing as a motorcycle company would lead to commoditization they said.

This brought me back to the data that companies have about customers and how they use products and how they are reached with marketing messages. A few years ago to be customer centric, meant you were practicing CRM – managing contacts, campaigns and customers.

Today to be customer-centric, you have to be engaged in learning, listening, engaging and conversing with customers. A CRM system may be part of that technology, but more important is the data, analytics and ingenuity that can be gained from those discussions.

If you are engaged in a conversation, you can find out new information about how your product fits into the customer lifestyle. If you are only interested in your product vs. other products, you end up open to product substitution.

This early morning radio broadcast made me realize how the data warehouse holds unseen promise for many organizations in marketing that probably only see it through the lens of direct marketing. Leading marketing organizations are choosing analytics as a life-style and shifting how they go to market.

By the way, if you want to learn more and are in the St. Louis area, go to the Teradata User Group and see Peeter Kivestu present on Teradata Integrated Web Intelligence.

Paul Barrett

Faraway, so close

David Placke — 4/12/2010

Before I dart off to my first sessions at day two of our Enterprise Intelligence Summit, let me share some impressions from day one. Having ploughed through a packed agenda, we let the evening wind down at Tempelhof Airport, which was closed in 2008 and has since earned a reputation as an event location. It has been the setting of a number of films like Billy Wilders “A foreign affair”, or Wim Wenders’ ingenious “Faraway, so close” with the famous U2-Song “Stay”. More importantly, it was the centre of the Berlin airlift in 1948/9 when railway and road access to the Western parts of the city were blocked. It was Tempelhof where the so-called “Raisin Bombers” landed and supplied the people of Berlin with food and other essentials for nearly eleven months.

How times have changed! Groceries and consumer goods are abundant – and retailers have to compete for the customer by creating the best shopping experience. Which basically means offering a consistent customer dialogue across sophisticated sales channels, as Dr. Gerd Wolfram, Head of CIO-office, METRO Group, explained. Metro’s future store initiative is following the Zeitgeist by offering customers a mobile shopping assistant (MSA) that creates shopping lists and provides additional product information. As for the relevant data, no one would seriously complain that they have become generally scarce recently; the real question is how to leverage the data as a strategic asset for the organization. With data at your disposal you’re as close as you can be to understanding every aspect and process of your business. But if you’re not able to unearth the treasure, meaning to draw the information from the data – you’re far away from it, maybe even further than if the data didn’t exist at all…Faraway, so close.

Certainly Professor Hans Rosling would agree with that. He impressively demonstrated that decisions based on presumptions are no better than those made by chimpanzees. There is no alternative to considering all the available data out there if you want to understand what is happening out there. Forget about gut decisions.

Trend-spotter Markus Lindkvist is in line with Rosling. He claims that our thinking can be at odds with reality. Do you still feel like twenty, although you’re already past your fifties? A common attitude, according to Lindkvist. This is because we all tend to see things not as they are, instead we see them as we are and call that being focused. Future is about unpredictability and things we’ve never thought about, says Lindkvist. And I would like to add: you’d better take care that you are really aware of what’s going on right now, because it will be challenging your status quo.

Before I’ve got to go, let me quickly call your attention to some of my personal highlights of today, which are the general sessions with Bob Pritchard, Joschka Fischer and Geoff Burch. I definitely won’t miss those.

Getting the Time Right - Still

rita zimmerman — 4/12/2010

Since posting my previous blog Time and Tide wait for No Man I have noticed a few other examples of where the time had not ‘automatically’ adjusted for daylight saving changes. I say ‘automatically’ because we all have to manually adjust a range of clocks – in our cars, wristwatches, domestic appliances etc., and of course there are many public ones, such as my local surf club which is incidentally still on Summer Time – must be wishful thinking - the weather has been superb and the water is still very warm.

Anyway, the latest example of a time display which I expected to be updated automatically was on my return to Sydney last Friday on an international flight where the flight path display was showing local time (.ie., in Sydney) as an hour out as we were coming into land – it was still on Eastern Summer Time. I expect there were a few rather anxious passengers who were worried about missing interconnecting flights. You see we had been delayed in our departure and some passengers were making enquires even before we boarded!

I found this one rather odd as bookings, e-tickets and many other aspects of the airline business automatically adjust time of origin and destination correctly. I just wondered where this time feed was sourced.

Shape up

Sandra Worley — 4/12/2010

I recently began training in earnest for a marathon. The prospect of running 26-plus miles is a strong motivator, and is part of my ongoing effort to get in better shape.

This time, I have a new training tool to assist me. It’s an iPhone app that uses GPS technology to gauge how fast I’m running, how far I’ve gone on my route and how much farther I have to go. It’s pretty cool, though the kids roll their eyes when I show off its features to them.

Mapping the right course and tracking your progress on it doesn’t just apply to us aging runners. As NCR Vice President and CIO Bill VanCuren points out in his Teradata Magazine article “5 ways to rejuvenate your data warehouse,” the same principles apply to keeping your data warehouse in top shape. In fact, first on his list is:

“Create an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) roadmap.

“After dramatic or ongoing business change, prepare to rethink and even refocus the data warehouse. Don’t panic if you feel unsure of the outcome of this process. Creating a roadmap is the first step to ensuring that the EDW meets your current and future business needs….”

That’s good advice for anyone looking to revitalize or extend the use of an EDW. Having a map is important if you want to hit the ground running.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Teradata prepares universities for the digital decade

David Placke — 4/13/2010

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: Banque Populaire Group migrated 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.

What Toyota could have done better

David Placke — 4/12/2010

Beye network has already turned up in Berlin and quickly produced an audio podcast with Duncan Ross, Teradata’s EMEA director of advanced analytics. In the interview, Duncan explains how data warehousing might have helped Toyota handle its recent quality problems in a better way. Mind that he doesn’t say that problems could have been avoided in the first place, given the complexity of engines, electronics etc. you find in cars these days. Rather he says that the scale of the problems, and possibly the cause, could have been identified earlier.

If you want to get an idea of what the automotive track on Tuesday morning is all about, take 10 minutes and listen to this podcast: http://www.b-eye-network.com/listen/13067.

Mario Bonardo

Get started with drive

Jamie Flynn — 4/14/2010

Good morning Berlin – it’s conference time. As exhausting as these days tend to be, they are certainly exciting, and I simply love them! I already had the chance to talk to some of the conference participants yesterday during our traditional welcome party, this year at Potsdamer Platz, in the heart of Berlin. On my way back to the hotel I found myself whistling a simple tune that I identified as “Wind of Change” by the Scorpions. Pure coincidence? I don’t think so. Wind of change was the hymn of the ’89 revolution and Berlin was its epicenter. Everyone knew that after the wall had come down the world was subject to radical change, and people were positive about it.

Today, many industries are in profound transformation processes. In contrast to last spring, when everyone was just wondering how to best weather the economic storm, experts in business and IT this year are displaying a kind of “future’s in the air” attitude. It seems that everybody is willing to ride the tiger. Companies are out to fully exploit the potential of cutting-edge analytical technologies to manage the change that comes both from economic challenges and new business models fuelled by technical progress. And, as Hermann Wimmer and Mike Koehler will point out at their opening sessions later this morning, we are in pole position to support these efforts. Teradata has proven that it can help companies to grow even in tough economic environments and will continue to do so – wherever the ride will take us.

Yesterday, we started out riding the “Trabi”, the cult vehicle of the former GDR that we took for our sightseeing tour through Berlin.

I do hope though that the cars of the future won’t have much in common with it. By the way: amidst a fundamental ongoing change process, the automotive industry is a remarkable example of new drive in every sense of the word. A lot of ideas that have been around for a while are now on the verge of becoming reality. And this is not only about innovative engineering but about entirely new mobility concepts, influenced by new web and mobile communications technologies – a “smart-phonisation” of individual cars and traffic management. Looking out of my window I find that is some way away yet, at least here in Berlin. But for now, let’s get started – with drive!

Image Source: trabi-safari

Getting started for Berlin…

David Placke — 4/11/2010

Berlin is the newest city I have come across“, wrote Mark Twain about 150 years ago, and I think it’s still true. This city is the embodiment of German history and the upheavals it has seen since the American writer has travelled the country. It seems that it keeps making fresh starts, never finishes, and is always under (re)construction. We were there for a few days to prepare the Teradata Enterprise Intelligence Summit, and when I looked around I saw recently built office blocks, old houses being renovated even though there are newer houses that looked even more decayed, empty sites, some of them having been empty for months or even decades, and so on. My German colleagues didn’t think all this activity was anything special. They remember that a decade ago the Berlin skyline was shaped by whole armies of cranes. And they showed me a few places where the locals retreat to relax as Berlin is one of the greenest capitals in Europe.

It’s this mixture that makes Berlin such an interesting place to be – at least for those who try to figure out a meaningful structure that captures life’s disorder. This is, in a way, what we are doing. I hope that this challenging mood will carry over into our conference sessions and fuel open, fruitful discussions.

Just like in the past years, the conference schedule is fully packed, so that some sessions take place in parallel. Also there are some special tracks that I would like to highlight:

Automotive: On Tuesday morning, you can join our special automotive track with a number of sessions that focus on quality management and supply chain management in the industry. This session will be held in German. Various representatives of car manufacturers and Teradata will explain how data warehousing helps to identify quality problems and their causes faster.

On Wednesday, you can choose between our three User Group sessions:

Healthcare: How can data analyses help improve quality of care while reducing costs? Representatives of GKV Spitzenverband, SAS and Teradata will debate this.
Advanced Analytics: Data analyses have become critical for the success of many enterprises in the past decade. Panellists from Migros, SFR France, Indicium and Telefonica O2 will discuss which tools and models will shape the next 10 years.
Customer Management and Insight: In this panel, representatives of Metro, Lloyd's and Pannon will tell us what they do in CRM. A Webtrends guest speaker will explain the latest developments in integrating online and offline channels to create a single customer experience.

Whatever your choices will be, you can always check out this blog for more news during the conference.
See you in Berlin!

Mario Bonardo

The Challenge of Product Problems

Darryl McDonald — 4/11/2010

Automotive recalls have been in the news lately, from a recent airbag recall costing multiple millions to the well-known multi-billion dollar gas pedal recall. And of course news of related accidents reminds us that product quality means more than figures on a balance sheet.

As these and other stories play out, it’s sometimes not easy to discover a problem, what causes it and how to solve it. Part of the challenge is that issues can go undetected for months. Once detected, defining the product, process, environmental, and usage factors driving failure is still difficult. This is largely because the massive amounts of quality and warranty data are often in various formats and reside in separate places. At Teradata, we’ve shown time and again that when massive amounts of data are brought together in a single data warehouse where sophisticated analysis can be performed, it’s possible to turn raw data into problem detection, scope identification and cause determination – the prerequisites to taking effective action.

Leading manufacturers know this and that’s why our manufacturing customers encouraged us and SAS to develop the SAS Warranty Analysis on Teradata solution that we just recently announced. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Special automotive track at the Enterprise Intelligence Summit

David Placke — 4/9/2010

There will be a special automotive track at the Teradata Enterprise Intelligence Summit in Berlin: Representatives from Daimler and component supplier Continental AG will explain to what extent they are

already using data warehousing for quality analysis and quality assurance. Considering that quality problems have been pestering various manufacturers recently, I think that they will be addressing a very relevant field.

It seems that while some industries, such as retail, banking and telecommunications, are quite mature in the sense that data warehousing is widely seen as key to market success, other industries like the utilities and oil production are still very much at an early stage. The automotive sector, and manufacturing in general, seems to be somewhere in between. There is a vast potential of data warehousing in automotive. My colleague Martin Willcox has pointed out some of it in another post, including early warning systems that identify component failures, making it possible to replace them proactively (and thus in a customer-friendly way). The most obvious application is, of course, supply chain management (SCM).

Now let’s look at the German automotive industry, for example. A recent study by European Business School, a university near Frankfurt, suggests that the potentials are far from fully exploited here: four out of five decision-makers feel inadequately supported by their intelligence systems. There seems to be a patchwork of analytical systems that allow for a limited perspective rather than a holistic view. Analysts seem to spend a great deal of time preparing data when they should be analyzing them. Unsurprisingly, only a minority has capabilities like early warnings (35 percent) or event-based analytics (33 percent). Which basically sounds exactly like what we heard from other industries a couple of years ago.

Building an all-encompassing, reliable data base in the automotive industry is difficult simply because there is a lot of complexity in its supply and production chains: global sourcing networks, myriads of components etc. (On the other hand, this is precisely why the benefits would be so high.) It requires strong determination from top management as well as a great deal of cooperation between suppliers and producers. In some cases, this process could be nudged along by an unexpected driver: IT efficiency. With Teradata manufacturers will be able to consolidate various systems in a centralized data warehouse to save operating costs – and integrate their data sources at the same time. The main driver, of course, will be competition and the need for more efficient processes, just like in retail, telecommunications and other industries in recent years.

Niall O’Doherty

Quest for knowledge

Sandra Worley — 4/22/2010

When I was growing up, my mother encouraged me to become a librarian. I think she plotted that career path for me as I spent vast amounts of time at our public library pawing my way through aisles of books in search of a suitable stack to take home.

When use of the Internet exploded after 1990, I joined the swell of surfers seeking even more information. Today, it’s become second nature for me to jump on the Internet and search for Web-based knowledge.

There are certain online resources I look for when I need to know more about topics like geospatial analytics or business intelligence (BI) and how that information impacts our everyday lives. Researching these topics helps me better understand why my bank knows exactly when to ping me about a lower-rate mortgage just when I was considering refinancing, or how my use of an iPhone affects AT&T, my carrier.

One of my “go to” sources is Smart Data Collective (SDC). Just today, I was reading a post on SDC that explained why iPhone users behave differently than regular cell phone customers, why that’s a challenge for AT&T and how the company is using the consumer data to alleviate the situation. Stephen Baker, a New York City-based journalist with more than 20 years experience writing for BusinessWeek magazine, wrote the post He has several pieces published on SDC, which now features the top three posts broken down by industry, BI and data mining. His is just one example of the independent, thought-leadership available through this social media forum.

Technology has certainly enabled me to broaden my search for interesting topics to read through the Web’s “virtual library.” But I have to admit, periodically I drive over to my old library, take in the hushed atmosphere and begin searching for that perfect book to wrap my hands around.

Ginny Wennen
Associate Editor
Teradata Magazine

Persuasion in simple terms

David Placke — 4/7/2010

Partly to give the Berlin conference with its very informative sessions and presentations a lighter note, partly because we are curious about how he makes us think out-of-the-box, we have invited Geoff Burch to address the conference. Burch is probably the most unconventional business guru, masterfully oscillating between stand-up comedian and management consultant. He likes to entertain the auditorium as much as he likes to spark new insights in the board rooms of major blue chip companies.

Burch has become a TV celebrity in Britain where he has his own TV show at the BBC, called “All over the shop” – a title that implies at first glance a certain element of chaotic creativity but actually hints at his TV clients: small High street businesses such as cafés, grocers etc. Burch gives economic advice in simple, yet unique terms. Like this one: “Your employees can be the ambassadors or the assassins of your business. Which one do you want them to be?”

He does more than just crack jokes. In order to run an operation successfully, he preaches, you have to win the minds, hearts and trust of your employees. Burch reminds us that business intelligence on its own is not enough. Data warehousing is about enabling your employees to make better, faster decisions by means of information. But what will make them actually want to improve their decision making? Burch, who has authored a book about persuasion in business, will share a few tips with us.

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"

Retail’s Growing Requirements

rita zimmerman — 4/6/2010

Globalization of business means more complexity and retail is a perfect example of this. Given the old adage that retailing is all about having the right product, in the right place at the right time then the science of optimising product ranges at store level and maintaining on-shelf availability is critical and these disciplines were some of the first to be improved with the advent of data warehousing.

Delivering insight for a single country is demanding enough but it is taken to the extreme when the queries required for a huge number of countries all run on the same engine. Look at Metro for instance. Metro operates in 32 countries in Europe, Northern Africa and Eastern Asia, spanning seven time zones. Every single one of its thousands of stores has a unique customer base, from hypermarkets in China to small markets in Paris, and each one needs a tailored assortment to best meet its own customers’ needs.

About three quarters of the goods that Metro sells are supplied by regional producers, which makes sense economically (and ecologically), but which also makes demand chain management more complex. And, just to add another challenge to the list, demand forecasting and trend analysis is a critical differentiating capability in the competitive landscape of the retail industry. Let me remind you of the point articulated so well by Magnus Lindkvist that trend analysis is always “a race against time”.

All of this describes the business side of the challenge. But how does Metro ensure that its decision support keeps pace with the growing complexity? First of all, it is a matter of performance which obviously depends on the scalability of the data warehouse. (It’s not coincidence that the bedrock of Teradata’s customer base includes many retailers.)

Then there is availability - downtime, whether planned or otherwise is never a good thing, but when you cater for seven time zones, it’s simply not an option and Metro’s “Dual” system effectively ensures this. At the same time, this also means that workload requirements vary during the day. CRM users in East Asia will be working while Europe is asleep, so tactical queries from China that support simple screen refreshes need to be given priority to batch processes in Germany. Therefore, Metro has refined its workload management to ensure that every user group will be serviced at the required level.

Metro runs a powerful and sophisticated data warehousing environment and in his keynote speech at the Teradata Enterprise Intelligence Summit in Berlin, Dr. Gerd Wolfram of Metro will tell us more about how Metro uses its data to respond to changing information needs in a more and more complex business.

Jonathan Tebay

Last Chance to See

Paul Barrett — 4/1/2010

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.)

Years ago, I went to the Tattered Cover book store in Denver during Douglas Adams’ tour for his book Last Chance to See. It is a beautiful book in design, story and writing. In it the author goes out to see some of the most endangered species in the world. The lead characters are Yangtze River Dolphins, Kakapos, Aye-Ayes, Komodo Dragons and Douglas Adams. All were endangered and didn’t know it.

Last week TedTalks featured a presentation by Mr. Adams. And this week I took my daughters to go to see the Colorado Capitol Dome (to which my 4 year old looked up and up and up and said "What the Heck"). And these are related much as a whale and a petunia appearing in outer space. (Look it up).

About half-way through our 5 mile round trip. (5 Miles – 25,odd thousand feet) I realized we were on our own LAST CHANCE TO SEE, albeit without the incredible species, exotic locales and fantastic writing.

In this short trip, the internet’s impact on the world became crystalized for me in the eyes of my daughters. Because I grew up in a completely different world than they will. We all say that – 3 channels, black and white TV, and Gilligan’s island are all part of another time and place. But I am talking about a radical change in less than a generation. That doesn’t mean these companies or brands will go extinct, but how we experience them will change dramatically.

Just a short glimpse of this journey could be seen on my iphone. We just past the old Blockbuster location, you used to be able to rent VHS copies of movies there. Now here is 9News Colorado – there is app for that. On your right is Mapsco (a really cool map store if you happen to be in Denver), but I have GPS on my phone, that works almost anywhere in the world. There is a mailbox – who uses those anymore. There was a story on NPR today about how colleges are e-mailing acceptance letters (next they will Friend you if you get in). Within eyesight of the capitol is The Denver Post, the main newspaper in the region now that the Rocky Mountain News has folded.

Later on we stopped at Twist & Shout, one of the coolest music stores in the country. I have spent way too much money there in the past, but now I download a lot from itunes and more from emusic – but I also use Pandora. It is next door to the incredible, new location for the Tattered Cover. I have not yet become an ebook person, but for some books – especially those for business, I see the value. For my kids, I hope these survive because they have moved to experiential environments. There is nothing like walking into the Tattered Cover or Twist and Shout.

Last month, I had to renew my plates at the DMV, which in Denver is near the studios for the local NPR station – KCFR. But I download my podcasts from KCRW in Santa Monica and KEXP in Seattle – and I have the NPR app on my phone. But the Music That Matters and Morning Becomes Eclectic can’t be found locally. So I download and listen when I want, where I want - and contribute accordingly. (PS, there is an App for that too!)

So I am driving to the capitol and thinking about the vastly different experience these girls will have than I. I was a paper boy with the NY Times. The local NPR station was a block from my house (WVIA) and I knew the people that worked there. Bookstores and records stores opened up new worlds to me. When I had the chance to travel I went and bought maps of Nepal, Ecuador, The Amazon, the Rockies – exotic places that I remember with the tactile feeling of the map folding and unfolding. Nevermid will my daughters get to experience the Khumbu Valley or the Rio Napo the way my wife and I did – these are more basic differences. How will they experience maps, newpapers music, books, communications … the list goes on and on. Now this is bad for those of you old freestyle skiers out there I ask that you remember the BonePhone.

Don’t Panic

(source – istockphoto)

I don’t think these are isolated – every business is feeling these pressures. And if they aren’t, they will. Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence solution is both a reaction to these changes and a solution for our customers. As the internet creates more and more information for Teradata customers, it is critical to have a solution that can bring that data together with the rest of the enterprise. Otherwise decision making breaks down, response to the market slows and meetings devolve into philosophical discussions about "what is a sale".

These posts are also about the data warehouse in the internet age. 10 years ago it was about bringing all the information in the company together. Now it is a place where internal information and external information from places like Google, Axciom, ComScore, Nielsen, Experian and on and on and on, come together into an analytical, actionable, and automatable business intelligence environment. The data warehouse has to connect to the internet cloud – and the cloud has to connect to the data warehouse.

If these are left unconnected – I give you one last Douglas Adam’s Quote to Contemplate:

I wish more people used that – especially when they are on a 24 hour news channel.

Paul Barrett

No foolin’

Sandra Worley — 4/1/2010

It might sound like an April Fool’s joke, but I think LinkedIn is clairvoyant. How else could it know who my friends and colleagues are with such accuracy? Every time I log on, it lists five people—most of whom I know but haven’t seen in years—and recommends I connect with them.

Shaken by the thought that LinkedIn is having me followed, I turn to iTunes for some music to soothe my nerves. But now the site is suggesting songs I might want to download. How did it uncover my secret fondness for ’80s metal bands? (And, yes, I would like to purchase “Foolin’” by Def Leppard.)

It turns out, there’s no insidious plot. These sites, and many more, are leveraging predictive analytics based on the stores of data my Web browsing has generated over time. How they do this became more clear to me after reading David M. Smith’s recent blog on Smart Data Collective.

In another eerie development, Teradata Magazine Online published a new feature, "Making the grade," on predictive analytics this week. Specifically, the article focuses on the importance of testing and validating predictive models to ensure they generate positive business results.

"You need to be able to test a model in the real world to ensure that the way you’re using it is effective," advises Gareth Herschel, a Gartner research analyst. "That’s a step that a lot of organizations don’t necessarily take, but it’s one of the more significant steps of the process."

And he’s no fool.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

When the data point tells a different story

rita zimmerman — 4/1/2010

I grew up on a farm, surrounded by all “Old MacDonald’s” animals. What many farmers’ sons and daughters know is that chickens are good as they lay eggs, and rabbits are bad as they eat grass and are destructive to fences.

So as a child it came as a surprise that the accepted town version of where chocolate eggs came from made no sense. The town version stated that the Easter Bunny came and left chocolate eggs, and we would all be tasked with finding these eggs in the garden.

But as a farmer’s son, I knew rabbits didn’t lay eggs, so how could it be possible that this animal that had always been a pest was all of a sudden the champion of chocolate eggs?

Fortunately, I had a father who was able to make it all clear to me. “Those town people have got it all wrong, the Easter chook (chicken) would come and lay the Easter eggs and the evil Easter bunny would come around and try to steal the Easter eggs, that’s why we don’t like bunnies”.

Even in my early days I was analytical, I went up to the chicken coop and sure enough the chickens were laying eggs, so it was not a big stretch to believe that Easter chook could lay chocolate eggs. So I went to the encyclopedia (what we used before Google) and looked up rabbits, sure enough no mention of eggs. So the data points matched the hypothesis.

So my question to all you analytic types out there is - Are you sure about this story of the Easter Bunny bringing eggs?

Daniel Tehan

Kick-starting Intelligence in Berlin

rita zimmerman — 3/30/2010

During the Teradata Enterprise Intelligence Summit in Istanbul last year, we introduced our community relations programme, Teradata Cares, for the first time in Europe. And, of course, we shall continue it during this year’s conference in Berlin. The general idea is that we want to give something back to those larger communities that we live and work in. In Istanbul, we gave books to children from a local school to help encourage and to enthuse them for education. Raising intelligence – a crucial capability not only in the corporate world.

In a diverse place like Berlin, there is no shortage of projects that would be worthy of a bit of support. We decided in favour of the non-profit organization Fusionstreet that supports children from non-academic families to enhance their future opportunities. Its "Manege" centre gives kids from different social and cultural backgrounds some extra coaching as well as a place to meet, play and get insights into their respective ways of life. Thus we at Teradata are beating the drum for the project.

Fusion activists can tell you that there is an international, time-tested team-building exercise that helps unlock unexpected potentials in many participants – football. Which is where you may come in: in the conference centre, we will put up a goal-practice wall. Just a few weeks before the start of the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa, you will have the opportunity to score a few goals in the city where last time’s final took place. By doing so, you will earn money for the project. So what else can I say? Just don’t miss it.

Sandra Ertel

Empowered users know their information needs

David Placke — 3/29/2010

In his seminal work In Search of Excellence, business guru and Teradata Universe keynote speaker Tom Peters identifies common denominators of America’s most successful businesses. Among others, Peters' highlights customer-centred approaches and several characteristics (bias for action, autonomy and entrepreneurship) that we might refer to as “agility”. Simultaneously, Peters emphasizes the importance of sparking enthusiasm among your employees.

Peters’ call to empower employees on all levels of organization is widely considered as the blue-print for operational business intelligence as we know it. And it’s being taken another step further with the advent of “private clouds” in enterprise data warehouse environments. As business users have become increasingly adept in using BI tools, they want more and more of them. And they want them fast, to help them explore the relevant data while their freshly-conceived questions are still in their minds. Private clouds are not so much a technology trend as a response to growing demands from the business side.

This is good news because it means that those empowered and motivated employees that Peters had envisaged don’t seem to fall into the trap of making decisions based on “experience”, which would come down to pure intuition. As Stephen Brobst said in Istanbul last year, “don’t trust your guts. Your guts will deceive you.” Instead, business users at multiple organizational levels realize (and describe) their information needs. And private clouds make it easier than ever before to fulfil these needs.

Something for nothing

Sandra Worley — 4/22/2010

Every day, millions of people watch videos on YouTube, record their favorite TV shows with TiVo and “Google” a company, person, product or event—many from their cell phones. That’s the freedoms provided by open-source software (OSS).

Maybe some people care to understand the technology, but let’s face it, most do not. Savvy companies need to care and most are embracing OSS, particularly as they shrink their IT departments’ staffs and slash their budgets. They’re finding that OSS allows them to use the technology for their business intelligence (BI) needs—free of charge.

And, as the popularity of OSS has grown, the open-source movement is now a full-fledged, sophisticated community with standards, codes of conduct, rules and formal procedures.

If you are pondering using OSS as a BI solution, it’s important to take a closer look, says Claudia Imhoff, president of Intelligent Solutions and an expert on data warehousing and BI. “Determine your organization’s needs, its acceptance to open source and the specific features and functions of such a comprehensive offering, and then come to your own conclusion about its fit for your BI environment,” she says.

More insights from Imhoff are available in her Enterprise View article, “Dive in.”

Ginny Wennen
Associate Editor
Teradata Magazine

“TIME AND TIDE WAIT FOR NO MAN”

Jamie Flynn — 3/25/2010

As the saying goes.

I regularly walk and swim at my local beach and when it’s high tide the sand can be very soft, the surf a bit rough and the ocean pool gets churned up with the waves – so there’s not always a best time for my walk – so I tend to alternate between mornings and afternoons to pick the low tide timeframe. I had been away for a couple of weeks and decided to check tide times on the Weather Channel – it has an interactive button that downloads a variety of data, including sunrise, sunset and tide times for the day as well as lightning, rain radar and a 10 day outlook.

I decided that being 1 ½ hrs from high tide would be OK – so I went down to the beach only to find it much more like high tide – certainly it didn’t seem to be an ebb tide. Oh well, walk on the promenade and then dip into the “washing machine” of a swimming pool to cool down. Same thing the next day – I left a bit later, being Sunday, but still got the high tide. This time I went to the notice board that the surf patrol fill in – and sure enough high tide time was an hour later than the TV.

Well that got me thinking that maybe the TV was still displaying tide times as Eastern Standard – not Eastern Daylight Saving Time. Digital broadcasting has enabled data feeds from all sorts of sources, meteorology for radar, CTV cameras for the main roads, surf pictures from beaches up and down the coast – and of course tide time and sunrise/sunset times.

I naturally expected that times would be adjusted for daylight saving on these sort of data feeds, after all most applications have programs that cater for a daylight saving system around the world, our computers and mobile phones get automatically updated – and have so for many years. These feeds come direct from applications onto the digital display – and clearly without any modification. To prove my point I selected two towns on the border between two states, one that is on daylight saving and the other that didn’t. Sure enough their tide times were the same. What was interesting is that the sunrise/sunset data had been adjusted for daylight saving.

Why the ramble? Because it’s asking the same question and getting different answers – the consequence of having data in disparate data marts with inconsistent business rules but bringing the data together for reports/analysis. The formula to calculate tide times has been around for centuries and clearly the time factor is fixed. Because sunrise/sunset is the critical parameter that changes with daylight saving – its program has been modified.

A simple oversight that causes a lot of grief if the business rules applied to data are not clearly defined.

Rock Paper Scissors - Market Decision Making

Paul Barrett — 3/22/2010

"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."
- Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking)

CMO’s are facing one of the most difficult decision making climates in generations. While some think there is an analogy to the book the Perfect Storm, a sequence of powerful forces converging to create a momentary disastrous environment. I posit that this is the new reality in marketing decision making – a highly fluid, highly reactive, highly charged atmosphere.

This isn’t a bad thing, challenges can drive elevation creativity, performance and results. In surveying the challenges for CMO’s in 2010 for a recent presentation, it became clear that creating the space to elevate performance in this market is going to be very difficult for four reasons:

No Gravity
Constant Conflict
Tactical Engagement
Managing by Measurement

One of my early mentors had a string of unique, folksy, down home analogies that he applied to the dynamically changing telecommunications environment of the 1990s. I still remember many of these and chuckle at their continued usefulness. The one I have been drawn lately is that you

“You can’t have to check for gravity every time you wake up”

In decision-making terms this means that there have to be constants you can assume to your make predictions, forecasts and plans fit the business environment. However in a market decimated by financial uncertainties, rapidly evolving due to technology and product substation and where the competitive playing field has been leveled through consumer adoption of search and social media it is hard to point to any true laws that can govern decision-making.

Having to check for gravity everyday creates strategic decision making chaos. Long Term decisions are tempered by greater than normal uncertainty and become considerably more conservative – less spending, longer trials, fewer risks – or more instinctive and reminiscent of Rock Paper Scissors.

There is also a downstream affect (to not only mix a metaphor, but to completely contradict a metaphor) which leads to institutional conflict. The lack of resources, tied to the demand for new investment with downward financial pressures is the classic environment for marketing conflict. There are excellent article out there describing these challenges such as Five Marketing Battles that make No Sense. But consider the battles that the CMO has to endure everyday.

Online vs. Traditional marketing
Search vs. Display advertising
Outbound vs. Inbound
Advertising vs. Direct Marketing
TV vs. Itself
Marketing vs. IT
Marketing vs. Finance
Marketing vs. Sales
Targeting vs. Privacy
oh yeah – the Competition & Googlization

Budget battles can be a good thing – focusing the organization, all these battles lead combined with the dynamic nature of the marketplace today can lead to a tactical focus, rather than strategic. When the CMO has to dedicate time to Cohesive Communication and Getting Along then they are getting into the weeds and being distracted by all the new ways to reach consumers – what should the budget be for display ads on mobile social media sites? The CMO has to elevate the discussion, rather than try to answer potential un-answerables.

I think one challenge in a world swimming in data is that quantitative decision-making can get in the way of understanding. In our Biggest Brands Can No Longer be Managed By Nerds Tom Hinkes argues that the pendulum has swung to far in the Brand Marketing Space.

As a contrarian by nature, I would argue that is not true. But that we are only managing what we can easily measure. We have high level KPI’s such as Revenue, ROI, Acquisition, Loyalty, Share of Market or Customer Satisfaction. At one time these useful indicators of where the business was going. I used to do Share of Voice vs. Share of Market and customer profitability analysis once, maybe twice a year to help steer our $100MM advertising budget or our network investment.

Now, with the detailed analytics available through the web we are awash in data of the moment. In Data, Data Everywhere the Economist has done a great job of highlighting the incredible opportunity arising from having detailed data, but also the risks of it.

For the CMO the biggest risk can be starting to only manage what you can measure – thus becoming more and more focused on tactical incremental impacts. The real opportunity from all this data is to re-think the strategic / big picture assumptions.

These questions such as:

How do you measure customer centric success in a channel driven organization?
How do you shift the focus of KPIs from KEY to INDICATOR – to ensure investment in long term strategies
How do you measure the interaction between investments – marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
How do you take advantage of the changing marketplace rather than being a victim?
What are defensible competitive advantages vs. temporary marketing innovations

Okay – this post has posed too many questions and challenges and I should give some relevant ideas that can be helpful. Clearly I don’t know have the answers to all these questions. But I think there are some places to start.

Create Gravity: With Data from across the organization it is possible to have a marketing decision making platform that provides enough pillars to make faster, more accurate decisions.
Fight Conflict with Information: With an Enterprise approach to marketing data, eliminate the arguing about facts part of conflict. When everybody has the same data they can influence and elevate each other. Make sure competitors and the Marketplace are the number 1 & 2 conflicts in the organization.
Strategic Engagement: Once there is a more level decision making playing field, there is more room for strategic decision making.
Measure What Should Be Managed: Spend analytical efforts creating the KEY performance INDICATORS of GREATNESS, not just reporting on what can be measured.

I view Teradata’s Integrated Web Intelligence solution as a part of this puzzle. One quote I heard on a call with a customer was “Now I can get my web data to the thousands of EDW users I have – not just the handful that look at Google.” In a customer workshop we spent hours teasing out the detailed data needed to look at channel attribution – something not possible with a lot of data silos. It is not a panacea for everything that challenges the CMO today, but it is a place to look for eliminating some of these problems.

If today’s marketing organization is going to shift from knowledge to understanding, we need more tools like Teradata’s IWI.

Use of Technology - My thought process on this one is a bit left field I know but… Part2

rita zimmerman — 3/19/2010

An update on my original blog discussing the issue of how to best leverage technology to gain advantage – I was recently in Beijing and went to the market to look for some new badminton rackets to replace my now depleted stock! I wanted to save money as new rackets these days cost around $220-$250 and I needed more than one.

So found some Yonex rackets in one of the markets for only $40 each! and they were the top of the range ones. Looked good!

When I got back home and tried them out, yuck! It felt awful, the strings were a terrible feel. I tried see if changing the strings would to make them a bit better so I got one restrung (another $20). It felt a bit better but still no good really. One of the guys at our club imports badminton equipment so I went to him and he had a look at them – guess what, they were definitely fakes, good ones though! He gave me a pukka one, felt totally different of course, "did what it said on the box".

So while it is up to you to make the most of good technology beware of fakes/look alikes or things that seem cheaper in the short term!

Speaking of best-in-class we are hosting our Teradata Universe event next week, featuring best-in-class business case studies from AT&T, Bank of America, DHL Express, eBay and J D Williams. I will also be on hand to answer any question at the Teradata “Ask the Experts” session.

John Street

The Social Media Evolution is an incredible opportunity: but needs business management’s understanding of why and how!

Ron Swift — 3/19/2010

The recent explosion of the numbers of users on social networks and using social media has proven to the business community that “word-of-mouth” is much stronger than simple brand or product advertising. This has, surprisingly, been true also in the area of product introductions (of high-tech such as the iPhone or specialized media such as TV/Sports). We are approaching the level of direct communications that is similar to the rise of automobiles in the post-World-War II period of industrialization and distribution in the 1950s-1970s.

Interactive applications, social-media, and even company-owned websites will endure more easily than their real-estate-prone predecessors. Banking, insurance, retailing, airlines, auctions, books, media, music, television, sports, and even job hunting have all been transferring quickly to utilize the internet as a major source of new business or a major channel for getting to customers (or networks of customers) through deep and advanced analytics (BI). Connection IS power!

Recently, a blog article by Mark Smith, the CEO of Ventana Research, focused on their view of the massive and permanent changes to our personal and BUSINESS USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA. He is at: (www.twitter.com/marksmithvr ) Mark stated that “Social media collaboration, like any activity related to marketing or interactions in general, is best assessed through measurement. Figuring out how to measure social media interactions and effectiveness has been no easy task for technology providers as measurement is easy only in comparison to the challenge of truly understanding its effective value. It’s not dissimilar from the challenge marketing organizations face in striking the right balance of quality and quantity in the business opportunities (“leads”) they generate…”

Teradata has been working with several advanced analytical and data gathering software firms to bring together and integrate customer and prospect data to ensure a better understanding of actions and reactions. These analytical systems, formally known as Enterprise Data Warehouses (EDW), have now become Active DW’s. What does this mean? They are collecting data, not in batch, but, in minute-by-minute streams and integrating it directly with other customer data.

Why do firms collect, integrate, and analyze data in such fast processes? Well, it seems clear, from many company’s recent successes that providing relevant offers, on a timely basis (sometimes with seconds of the initial data collection and analysis), at the point of contact, with the right product, at the right price, through the right channel….is NO longer a dream.

This is the reality of advanced analytics and integrated data warehousing that is now Active in collection, loading, analyzing, and using near-real-time (NRT) information. Most firms needing such technologies have been latent in gaining their management’s understanding and acceptance of this shift in requirements. Many firms are still using BI and DW as a way of reporting on the past periods. They have not realized that reporting provides only data for viewing (and maybe learning); but active data and new visualizations are providing for operationalizing BI/DW and therefore managing the present and the future.

Yes, you can use analytics to actually predict the future, if you maintain hoards of past historical behaviors, transactions, buying patterns, trends, web page looks, click-throughs, and also textual data that your customer can give you regularly to tell you about them or their needs.

This brings us to think how the future use of Personal Digital Assistant (PDAs), now sold also as iPhones and Nokia special phones, will allow business to drive customers through offers and opportunities. Banks and airlines can benefit from major cost reductions, increased customer take-rates on marketing/sales offers, and avoiding competitive forces stealing their customers.

This will also be true in the mobile telephone business, if those companies realize that one-to-one marketing is essential and that the content may be more important (for revenues) than the communication network connections (meaning the towers and the call fee collections). The world has changed in media and entertainment to provide cable, satellite, and now, PDA watching of major sports and all forms of entertainment. The mobile industry is hastily running hard to figure out what to do. Call prices are going down in many countries, the cost of the network remains the same or is going up (needing new bandwidth for internet connections and streaming of video), and the need for personalized, individualized, selective, and specially prepared offers will make a huge difference in their success or failure --- as a company and as an investment.

Imagine if our automobile manufacturers actual spoke directly with their prospects and truly understood what they desired in an automobile and gave direct input to the design, manufacturing, and pricing. Then an interactive discussion on the merits of the automobile (from a trustworthy knowledge source) to educate the customer. And then to assist them with making the right decision, but not based on pressure-tactics, or sales prices, or even rebates. We all would be much happier.

Using analytics to inform your management about the number of tweets on your site, or even the numbers of people following your “tweets”, becomes almost irrelevant in a changing landscape and world of ideas that is forever dynamic. Active DW, with changeable models and analytics (that learn from themselves) will be the foundation of future predictive analytical visualizations, while also providing for instant recognition of opportunity and the offers to be made. This will take place in the utilities industry (with electronic wireless data collection from meter boxes), in the airline industry (seeing weather changes and people needing to change itineraries), and in other industries where dynamic environments drive people behavior changes.

This will also come true in elections, in countries that have large masses of people on social media networks, and use the systems to communicate news or changes in opinions about candidates or incumbents. Watch the 2010 USA Congressional Elections and see how many incumbents will use ‘social media’ to get to their voters. It will be astounding. This follows the great success of Barrack Obama and The Acorn Group plus the Democrats to truly exploit the social media method as a way of influencing voters. It was a great success. It is only the beginning. And there is little way to stop this movement or evolution. It is like the telephone of one hundred years ago. Eventually everyone will have one, first wired (it took about 80 years) and then wireless (most saturation points were achieved in most countries within 10 to 20 years).

So what can we all do to make this evolution a positive, useful, and a successful business opportunity? The first movement would be to collect immediate web data and integrate it with previous customer data. Second, to analyze this data and use it to sell products, manage services, deliver products faster, get to the market easier, make your marketing costs go down, and increase your revenues. We should jump on any and all examples and see if they fit our opportunity.

Many first initiators of a new technology become the winners. Sometimes the second round improves upon the first round, and you now have that opportunity. Don’t waste your time going through analysis paralysis on whether you need to do this. It will stall your calendar and you will waste more time and money instead of increasing your revenues. Each month or quarter lost, is lost money. Lost profits. Lost customers. And also loss of the future use of the internet/social channel by your firm with those customers. They will go elsewhere and never return!

Mark Smith has suggested (and I agree since these firms are Teradata Alliance Partners) to review recent white papers which help you gain knowledge. See: “Informatica Demonstrates the Value of Data for Every Organization”, and See: “SAP Broadcasts New Enterprise Software and Applications Strategy“, and SAS Institute “SAS Simplifies the Science and Use of Analytics in 2010“ . And as the foundation for advanced analytics and using these above techniques, learn more at “www.Teradata.com and search on “Integrated Web Intelligence (IWI)”

There are three things that you can do.

Do nothing and your competitors will surpass you. “Beware of the Ides of March”.
Use external resources to augment your present staff to advance your abilities to use the Social Media and even your firm’s website to better understand and communicate with your customers.
Be a leader and engage proven vendors or consultants to ensure that you will not be reinventing the past. Let me know what you are doing or not doing.

Personal Note: My father would have been 106 years old today and he would not have believed what we are communicating about in this blog or even how we are doing it! Time is moving quickly!

I’m all ears on this one. Good luck,

Regards, Ron Swift, VP of Cross-Industry Business Solutions for Teradata Corporation

Come Together

Sandra Worley — 3/17/2010

When two companies come together through a merger or acquisition, uncertainty abounds. However, one thing a newly forged organization shouldn’t be unsure of is its data.

That’s why it’s so important to establish a single platform as part of the merger process. Moving toward one data environment should be part of a transition team’s objectives. So says Daniel Fisher, Executive Partner–Accenture Information Management Services, in the latest issue of Teradata Magazine. "The first thing to do is gather data and look through it," Fisher says. "How are you going to integrate your customer records, sales, suppliers and all that transactional data? From an operations perspective, you want to understand the books and where you stand there."

More insights from Fisher, as well as Rob Toguri, Capgemini Global Vice President of Business Intelligence (BI), are available in the feature article "Fruitful combination."

While we’re on the subject of mergers, our piece on Sprint Nextel illustrates best practices for bringing two firms together. With a dedicated Base Marketing Warehouse, the combined telco’s Marketing Department gained a single, cohesive view of its subscribers for more effective subscriber management.

Building a cohesive culture and operation after a merger is a difficult task, but it can be made easier when everyone is on the same page—and platform.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

The Battle of Britain: Thought Leadership in Information Management

rita zimmerman — 3/16/2010

In the London Blitz of 1940, Great Britain was staring down defeat and an imminent German invasion. With cities, industry and dockyards experiencing nightly destruction, Great Britain needed to out-think Germany. They did this through understanding the value of key indicators and command and control; I'll explain how.

The evacuation at Dunkirk and Rommel's advancement in Africa did not bode well for the Commonwealth. The German Luftwaffe were outnumbering and outclassing English Gladiators and Typhoons in the air and the advance into Russia was an inevitable and grand demonstration that Germany was a dominant threat to the free world. Instead of surrender, complete retreat or negotiation, Churchill was decisive in taking the stance that we more commonly and contemporarily hear as "we don't negotiate with terrorists". I am sure that when he made this heavy decision, he got his best and brightest together in a underground bunker in London and would have said something like "right then chaps. What are we going to do about it?"

What they achieved was nothing short of brilliant. Whether by accident or design, they developed 4 maxims for information:

Metadata - The Ministry of Defence was very fastidious about classifying, naming and understanding data. Bletchley Park embarked on breaking the Enigma and other German codes. Today, we might call this the establishment of "a common business language". With code and decode values and their meanings (some of which had contextual change or interpretation) the British created what would be considered a metadata repository to understand the communications data of the Germans and combine it with their own to create insight. These were facilitated by codebooks and early analogue computing devices. They had data about data and they were making the linkages to create insight for action.
Data integration - the study and implementation of radar to give accurate, trusted data on enemy movements enabled mapping and near-to-real time modeling of the Battle of Britain for immediate response. This war-room simulation and true command and control was arguably pivotal in the turning of the tide for Great Britain. Through data integration of radar data, on-the-ground intel and communications, the Ministry of Defence was able to triangulate and create a thorough and trusted situational awareness upon which they could look at the highest risks and mitigate them. The extension and visualisation of this is depicted in the famous film the Battle of Britain where Women's Royal Air Force ladies move models around a map flanked by a score of communicators and officers feeding intelligence, happenings, radar data and commands into the equation (the early version of today’s Geospatial mapping).
Understand What Makes Best-in-class - the British undertook to invest in the best-in-class equipment for where it counted the most. They looked at the immediate risks to them which was fighter escorted bombers annihilating their way of life, followed by a blitzkrieg assault on the ground. How do you mitigate this threat? They needed a superior fighter in numbers that could out-fight the escorts and something agile enough to get in quickly and take down bombers before they can off-load their deadly payload. These aircraft needed to be ready, repaired, maintained and deployed at a moment's notice to patrol areas / patrol during times of risk and respond to confirmed threats. The British would invest a significant part of their war effort on this capability. Enter the Spitfire and the men who flew them, in all their glory. Easy to fly, easy to repair and deadly in the air. Radios in each plane and disciplined communications through a common language was the mechanism they used to feed information back to the war room on how this threat mitigation was performing.

These four maxims of information management; metadata; data integration; and best in class, galvanised the strategy that stopped the Germans from being able to use their superior man-power to march jack-boots up and down Trafalgar Square.

With Churchill and his war cabinet in the war room, they created an environment of near-to-real time information management and situational awareness. This competitive edge was the cornerstone of their role in defending their nation and ultimately playing their alliance role in winning the Second World War.

With war-rooms being replaced by dashboards and sophisticated Data Warehouse, analytics and intelligence technologies, it shows us that the demand and principles are enduring. As time has moved on over 60 years of innovation, the enabling technology used by Teradata means you don't need a cast of thousands manually participating to provide such insights and the greater awareness of having more than just the bare minimum of data, but rather as much information that is of value. Best in class, integrated data and understanding of the data you use for decisions and insights is what Teradata provides to its customers today.

I am still very impressed that the British came up with and augmenting these concepts without the enabling technologies of today, yet it was possible to create such a detailed and decisive situational awareness. For the future of information management and our understanding of it, the Battle of Britain really does show how pioneers evolved some of the information maxims of today; "so much is owed by so many to so few" and I am not just talking about the pilots!

David Bremstaller

Please complete: “There are things known and things unknown and in between …”

David Placke — 3/15/2010

Now, guess what!? Well, if you were to ask a BI expert at the Teradata Universe Conference to complete this sentence, he’d probably say “…a Teradata data warehouse”, and, for an amazing lot of questions, this is a perfect answer. Nonetheless I suppose that if you asked Joschka Fischer, former Vice Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany, who will be one of our keynote speakers in Berlin, he’d answer like a shot: “…there are doors” - and he’d be the winner of the quiz. I believe this is because Fischer, also known as the “godfather” of the German Green Party, was culturally conditioned in the years of the 1968 student movement to which Jim Morrison’s Band “The Doors” delivered the soundtrack.

When asked about the name of the band, Jim Morrison once said: “There are things known and things unknown and in between there are doors”. And, funnily enough, that is why even today many people believe that the Door’s singer authored these poetic words, while in fact he plainly quoted the famous British poet William Blake. Today, it will take you only a few clicks on the internet to check this out, but notably Blake is ranked only Nr. 4 of the Google search results. Jim Morrison gets the top spot with other links suggesting, for example, Aldous Huxley as the author of the quote. How do you know which source you can trust? That may be a routine question for every Google user but it also gets to the core of what data warehousing is all about: trustworthiness and quality of information are key when it comes to decision-making.

And there is another dimension, too: handling complexity. Long before the term “globalization” was coined, international relations experts formed the idea of “interdependence” to grasp the growing complexity of the modern world. Some of them have concluded that we need stronger supranational institutions if we want to have any effective governance at all. One probably wouldn’t deny that such institutions sometimes increase, not decrease the complexity of the political sphere. So how did Fischer handle the decision-making process within these frameworks, trying to influence an opaque and permanently changing outside world, without being able to tell just how reliable the information at his hand is? This makes me curious about his keynote.

Cash-hungry state agencies finding megamillions in revenue by drilling for money with Teradata

Darryl McDonald — 4/7/2010

The Wall Street Journal just ran a story on how states are using specialized tools to drill for and find megamillions. But the story’s not on oil and gas drilling. It’s about state revenue and tax departments who are drilling deep into their infrastructure reservoirs for detailed data – across many rich subterranean sources. They’re becoming masters of tapping into veins of data that they can convert to cash – with Teradata databases and tools. States mentioned in the article are Oklahoma and Ohio, however several others have hit some big revenue geysers. They’re excited about it, and have some very happy finance and information executives.

Not all of the state testimonials made it into the final WSJ article. The State of Texas has been drilling with Teradata for years and has uncovered and collected more than $900 million in unreported and under-reported tax revenue. The State of Missouri began a few years ago and it has collected more than $90 million.

The State of Maryland just joined this group of innovative governments and is now implementing a Teradata enterprise data warehouse system and tools to mine data for tax revenue. All told, our state agencies using Teradata systems to drill data have recovered over $1.3 billion.

We at Teradata have bet our business on the premise that the solution to almost every economic problem that organizations experience can be resolved by using our powerful, real-time analytic database to explore and exploit their own dynamic reservoirs and click streams of detailed data for actionable, money-making information.

We congratulate these resourceful and innovative state agencies for following the lead of many global commercial organizations in finance, telecommunications, and retail that have discovered that drilling into detailed data with Teradata database systems can send 100-foot fountains of profitable revenue up into the air -- and spray it all over their businesses, year after year.

Darryl

Spot success

Sandra Worley — 3/12/2010

Succeeding in business is all about spotting opportunities and capitalizing on them. And as our Q1 issue lays out, geospatial technology is proving to be one of the most promising ways to do just that—find the right location to set up a store, determine the best geographical region to reach with a targeted marketing message, and make a multitude of other business decisions that rely on answering “Where?”

With our latest Dataplay puzzle, “Hot spots,” we invite you to test your ability to spot opportunities. See how quickly you can divide the grid into rectangular sales territories. Each must contain exactly one store, and the number of blocks in the individual territories must be the same as the number marked on the store. Solve the timed puzzle by April 1 to enter a drawing for a GPS homing device.

Also in this issue, read about Shelley Perrior, a database and middleware supervisor for Hudson’s Bay Co., who’s the focus of the Portrait article. Shelley has surely spotted her share of challenges and excitement so far in her career.

Here’s hoping you keep spotting plenty of your own success!

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Don’t let Oscar Fool You—3D Is Here

Colleen Quinn — 3/10/2010

Well, James Cameron didn’t exactly walk away empty-handed from Sunday’s 2010 Academy Awards, winning three Oscars in predominantly technical categories out of nine nominations. But, I’d be willing to bet he expected an even-bigger armful of the trophies, especially considering that Avatar is THE biggest box-office success in the world, ever. While the awards weren’t necessarily forthcoming, I suspect the Academy still recognizes a revolution when it sees one. The true advent 3-D content has arrived—and Avatar has made that very clear in a very big way.

I remember a time, something like three decades ago, when a 3-D experience meant a trip to the local 7-Eleven to buy green and red lenses to watch an Elvira “Movie Macabre” horror special on our home television. The highlight came as the Mistress of the Dark tossed a few handfuls of popcorn at the screen, causing me to squeal in delight. The fact that my parents allowed their young child to watch such garbage is the subject of another discussion.

My how things have changed. It’s been more than three-decades since 3-D made its first forays into our living rooms, but Hollywood and consumers would finally have us believe that the industry ready. Avatar’s HUGE success-- followed quickly on its heels by this weekend’s record-busting 3-D weekend release of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland ($ 116 million, blowing Avatar’s $77 million opener out of the water!), and the imminent releases of How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—is driving large consumer demand for 3-D, both in the theater and in the home.

3-D is driving big change throughout the supply chain. First, there aren’t enough theaters to accommodate the sudden swell of theatrical interest in 3-D, with an estimated 4,000 3-D-ready screens available in the U.S. and Canada by the end of March. (Compare this number to the 7000—screen average across which most wide-release films are released). It doesn’t take an expert to predict that there will be a surge in 3-D deployments by theaters across the country—and, some service providers are moving fast to take advantage (See recent news from Tech on its first 3-D Cinema deployment).

Then, there’s the impact to home theater—as if our latest technology refresh to the flat-panel wasn’t enough, a crush of 3-D televisions are hitting the market. And, while expensive, they aren’t all that much more expensive than a high-quality flat-panel when you consider the discounts manufacturers are offering to seize market-share. For consumers like me who didn’t bite the HD-TV bullet yet, 3-D TV is a viable option. Electronics manufacturers are out in force to storm the market. In fact, Panasonic just announced a partnership with Best Buy to sell something like one-million 3-D plasmas in the next 12 months, and most of those at steep discounts approaching 50%.

But the impact trickles down further. Box-office numbers are bigger. Home theaters need to change. And, advertisers need to consider their response. It’s happening. CBS Outdoor launched its first 3-D Campaign—though, granted it was digital signage. Royal Caribbean is also dipping its toes in the water (no pun intended) with a UK-based theater advertising campaign in 3-D. 3-D advertising will come to the television, too—and agencies and services providers are already preparing for the creative and technical demands which get dragged along.

Then there’s the next shake-up for studio home entertainment organizations. These guys have been rocked about for years with platform changes and introductions. Still reeling from the speedy introduction of multi-platform digital distribution, and the rapid adoption of Blu-ray, Studios have another format on their hands—and most majors are looking to introduce their first 3-D home video products this year.

I’m not much a gambler, so I won’t offer any predictions. I’m curious how this will all shape-up as the year progresses. Until then, I’ll just say this: I always suspected that Elvira was a trail-blazer!

*Image Source: article.wn.com

The explosion of data

David Placke — 3/10/2010

Utility companies are on the verge of having to learn how to drink from a fire hose when it comes to data.

Smart meters are rolling out to a house near you, by 2013 all houses in Victoria will be fitted with a smart meter. So the utility companies are going to move from 4 transactions a year to between 17520 to 35040 transactions per year, depending on the number of channels that the smart meter uses.

There must be quite a few thoughts that are going through the minds of these organizations, but once they get past the fear of so much data, think of the opportunity.

As someone who is fascinated with what data tells us about people, I am looking forward to better understanding of how I as an individual actually use energy. So I thought I would share my hopes around what a utility company will use my data for:

Visibility to how I am using energy though out the day
Visibility into how much I am paying for energy during the day
Comparison between me and other houses in the same area
Comparison between me and an eco friendly house
Hints around how I can reduce my energy bill
Rate plans that drive an eco friendly house

Most of us want to be green, smart meters are an opportunity for Utility companies to work with their customer base to drive down our carbon foot print. And the best bit about all of this for me is, Teradata is the right solution for an explosion in data.

Daniel Tehan

The Surgeon, the Survey and Survival

rita zimmerman — 3/9/2010

Statistical analysis is a venerable approach in medical research. It is one way to find causes of conditions that are not fully understood, for example triggers of incurable diseases like cancer. It can also give you a good idea what determines child mortality rates in a given society at a certain point-in-time. The key determinants may not even be of a medical nature, as Hans Rosling, professor for international health, will point out at the Teradata Universe in Berlin.

Rosling is both a scientist in the medical sphere (he has discovered an unknown disease in Africa and its cure) and a pioneer of data visualization in the health sector. He has worked to turn “static” statistics into dynamic developments that make sense immediately. It is quite amazing what his tool can do – it gives a degree of flexibility that makes it easy to quickly check an idea (provided that you have the data available). The benefit goes beyond application in the health sector – you simply get a better understanding faster. Rosling’s favourite example is how visualized insights can dispel myths about the developing world. But let’s stop here. Rosling is a brilliant presenter so let’s not spoil the show in advance. Please come to Berlin to see for yourself.

Once you’ve seen Rosling, you will start wondering what else data analyses could do for the health sector. At the conference, there will be a whole workshop dedicated to this. Joint customers of Teradata and SAS will explain how they have increased quality and reduced costs (at the same time) employing advanced analytical capabilities. To me, it’s one of the most interesting fields at the moment – it has reached some level of maturity but its potentials are far from being fully explored. I think we will see some real progress in Berlin.

Simon Doherty

Continuously Crossing Channels while Crossing the Continent

Paul Barrett — 3/9/2010

Oscar night and here I am blogging, did you see that Sandra Bullock? Was that couture or was that couture? And that Steve Martin what a hoot, really fake arrow through the head that never gets old. When I was on the red carpet earlier I almost gagged when I saw Joan Rivers …. Oh yeah, data, databases, customers … I got all dressed up for nothing…

Just checking in is a cross channel interaction.

I finally did the iPhone check-in for a flight and it was pretty impressive – no boarding pass, just swiped my phone through security and at the gate and onto the plane. That was pretty cool as I am always wondering where my boarding pass is while I wait for my flight.

The context of this is also interesting. I left Denver on a 4 day, 3 city trip – Chicago, Raleigh, Atlanta and back to Denver. I forgot to online check-in when I left my house so I had to do it at the kiosk. Then I checked in at the office in Chicago for my next flight, but I had to print it because it wouldn’t let me do the iPhone thing for the United Express flight. Then – I did the kiosk thing again in Raleigh because I didn’t have a printer and didn’t know the phone was an option. Lastly leaving Atlanta I was able to do it all from my phone.

So in four days, I used multiple channels for checking into flights as I headed across the country. The iPhone check-in was also interesting because it combined real-time messaging (SMS) with a mobile device for an offline activity – flying on a plane (at least it seemed like a real plane). And all this is happening within minutes – checking in, getting the message and loading the pass on my browser. Plus think of the rich data the airline gets knowing my phone number, browser info, willingness to try / adopt new technologies and my activity towards boarding (hint, I am kind of a last minute type of traveler).

I think this just highlights another of the many use cases for integrating online and offline data.

Speaking of integrating data, Webtrends and Omniture both announced new ways to measure Facebook activities. I know that smarter people than I are looking at the pros and cons of both approaches, I am talking to you Jim Sterne, Eric Peterson, John Lovett, etc.

First some background. A couple weeks ago, I was researching web traffic for a presentation to a large maker of refreshing carbonated beverages. But they had very limited web traffic, almost no search spending – but a huge brand. What was going on? They and their agency were primarily marketing through facebook. Just one campaign facebook page had over 500,000 fans.

But from a data standpoint that used to be a dead-end. You could see all the user-ids of fans, but what does that mean? Not much. But from what I understand from Mashable, is that Webtrends allows you to look at custom fans tabs – so you can understand what your fans are doing on the site as they move between tabs and put things on your wall etc. without having a Facebook application – and looks at the referring data so that you can see upstream on visitors – perhaps from Twitter. (screen shots here)

Because I got to present with Webtrends at Teradata’s Southeast user group last week, I was really excited because the audience had lots of great questions about how to use this for cross-channel marketing. Come out to San Francisco on April 1 and Newark in May and get more information from Webtrends yourself when we speak again at the Teradata User Groups.

Don’t take our word for it

Sandra Worley — 3/8/2010

At Teradata Magazine, we recognize that Teradata’s best spokespeople don’t work for the company. They’re the customers. That’s why we strive to highlight their successes in every issue—including the Q1 issue.

Starting with "Take 5", NCR Vice President and CIO Bill VanCuren offers his insights into the best way to rejuvenate a data warehouse.

In “Smart call,” we learn how Sprint Nextel integrated marketing data on a single data warehouse platform after the two telcos merged. Not only did the base marketing warehouse enable the company to enhance and increase targeted initiatives, the consolidation effort reduced expenses for maintenance, upgrades and system management.

Likewise, an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) was a key enabler for Freescale Semiconductor as that company undertook a massive re-engineering effort. In “Not just another link,” we discover how the chip maker revamped its supply chain planning system to deliver more accurate data to more users. All reports are generated from the same repository, enabling end-to-end data analysis.

Finally, as part of the cover story, “Pinpoint opportunity,” we examine the US Transportation Command’s (USTRANSCOM) use of technology to integrate location and logistics data in a visual format to coordinate missions. USTRANSCOM is responsible for the worldwide distribution of all personnel and equipment in the Department of Defense via air, land and sea. Real-time data at the fingertips of commanders empowers them to make timely, well-informed decisions to coordinate global operations.

That’s just a sample.

We’re always looking for great customer success stories. If you’d like to share one, drop us a line at teradatamaginfo@mspmag.com. Maybe your organization will be featured in an upcoming edition.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Advancing Corporate Uses of the Internet and Social Networking to Drive Business & Profits

Ron Swift — 3/4/2010

It’s about 65 years since World War II ended and that means major transitions - for many reasons. First, there are a massive number of ‘baby boomers’ who are becoming of age to receive health benefits (mostly through US’s Medicare), and secondly, there will be multiple European Countries that will default on loans, economic debt, and promises to their combined EU leadership. (You heard it here, right?) Third, the leadership of most of the leading industrial countries have been forgetting their functional job responsibilities or purposes and have embroiled themselves in politics (as usual) which is undermining the economies of the great 20th century nations. This century will become, or is becoming, accelerated in actions, based on Business Intelligence, Analytics, and the ability to track customers/prospects like never before. So the old ways are quickly passing.

Maybe these events will not affect the opportunity of all of us to reconsider what we could achieve by “knowing our customers” so much better and driving profitable actions. The world of the internet is taking over the world of “direct selling” and also of “knowing preferences of customers.” Or has it?

Social media, sometimes confused with social networking, has catapulted upon the scene and is driving many businesses to re-evaluate their web-investments and the requirement to integrated web-based information with normal customer/product information in their DW. Social Networking appears to be an excellent way for telecoms, banks and others to ‘see’ their customer’s connections or interactions.

Sherry Heyl informed us about Alan Radding’s interesting and informative recent articles on this subject. Alan has posted a series of articles about the internet itself, one special one on 03/03/2010 which covers social media and social networking. These insightful blogs have informed us that “there even is a social media portal for CFOs, called “CFOzone”, where financial professionals can engage in forums and discussions and participate in various types of professional social networking. But that is focused on the CFO’s professional development. Social media/networking also can do good things for the business itself. “

Alan’s point is to assist us, as I have been trying to do for sometime now, to better define what can and cannot be accomplished in this arena. He goes on to say: “To start, let’s not confuse social media and social networking — both terms are used interchangeably — with e-commerce. With e-commerce, you put up a Web site for the purpose of conducting business, making sales, and generating revenue.

“Social media is not overtly transaction-oriented. Rather, it revolves around content-driven marketing. For example, one large consumer packaged food company, put up a social media Web site. It does all the expected customer service things through the site, includes discussion forums for use by its customers, offers recipes and enables customers to share recipes, and provides ask-the-experts forums on related topics — all content-driven.”

“Social media generally avoid explicit commercial transactions. Instead, you create content with social media to build the business and the brand, everything from recruiting talent to rallying the faithful to countering bad news. (e.g. Toyota leveraging social media to rebuild its brand?)

Alan’s thoughts give us “6 content-driven things that any business can and should do with social media:

Establish presence. With hundreds of millions of active participants, you want continuous visibility among the people who are important to your business, be they customers, prospects. partners, or other stakeholders. (RSS Hint: don’t use this channel to provide nonsensical offers and things customers dislike. Learn from them, use it wisely.)
Build rapport and relationships with specific audiences. Cultivate relationships with your important stakeholder groups through two-way communication. (RSS Hint: Better understand the leaders, followers, and the potential buyers of the future.)
Establish your business as a leader and authority by providing helpful and insightful content that can’t easily be found elsewhere, information people want. (RSS Hint: Stop sending out silly or incorrect marketing/sales messages to your customers. You are killing your brand and the millions you have invested in the brand.)
Engage prospective customers and partners interactively. Invite feedback and input, and be responsive, attentive, empathetic, and supportive. (RSS Hint: Integrate this data and you will enable analytical possibilities that were never before acted upon.)
Listen and learn from your customers, supporters, and all your various stakeholders. Encourage constructive criticism, conduct surveys, solicit suggestions. (RSS Hint: Store these within customer records in your BI system.)
Build brand and company loyalty. Social media is an ideal vehicle to grow whatever loyalty initiatives your organization engages in.” (RSS Hint: Use ETL and web tools to discover and collect data which would help you satisfy customer needs.)

You might also try going to another location to review some great information at these 20 social networking sites for business professionals.”

Now, what does all of this have to do with Data Warehousing or BI? Well, smart companies have been gathering data from the internet, analyzing it carefully, sometimes integrating it with their own customer or prospect data, and making the right offer, at the right time (e.g. timing can be everything in business), through the right (customer desired) channel, at the right price (in a commoditized world), and with ‘personalization’ based on past experiences with the company.

Three suggestions from our customer experiences at Teradata Corporation:

Gather the detailed data from the internet, don’t just review the statistics/volumes/hits, and use the information to learn more about your customers and what they need.
Drive future offers based on customer needs, not just your product manager’s desire to get his products sold to anybody. This will enhance your credibility with your customers and also regain long-term loyalties. (Oh, loyalty also comes in the form of ‘free’ referrals to other customers, which brings high return for your analytical, marketing, sales, and pipeline investments.)
Measure and analyze the positive and negative transactions or lost opportunities. Learn from them and learn from what your customers are saying or doing on the internet through social media or social networking activities.

Using advanced techniques not just advanced tools, to Integrate web Intelligence into your marketing and sales, driven by facts not statistical figures or just hopes, will provide an assuredly greater contribution to your business. Many of our customers have seen this avenue as a way to truly ignite many opportunities, even during an economic downturn, a commoditized environment (or lower prices), wisely using a delivery of excellent, personalized, relevant, timely, and needs-based propositions and services through their data warehouses.

Have you accomplished something new such as this? Let us know. We appreciate your comments and feedback. Thanks for the tips Sheryl and Alan.

Ron Swift

Location Matters

Darryl McDonald — 3/4/2010

I was listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation a few weeks ago and heard a fascinating discussion with Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert, about how companies can successfully navigate crises that threaten their public image (Feb. 4, 2010).

Dezenhall made an excellent point about the position in which organizations find themselves when something goes wrong. He said that the first order of business – and the greatest challenge – is determining how widespread a problem is. Does it affect a single store or an entire region? Is there one unhappy customer or are there hundreds of them? Does the problem affect a single component or an entire product line? And where in the supply chain or manufacturing process did the problem occur?

Without quick, clear answers to these questions, companies have to guess at how best to respond, and sometimes, they guess wrong and never recover. These days, businesses can’t afford to guess; they have to know.

That’s where “location intelligence” comes in. The context of geospatial data, itself, is nothing new, nor is the idea that this data holds tremendous potential. What is new is that business intelligence technology has finally advanced to the point where geographic-oriented data that already exists in organizations can be effectively accessed, analyzed and acted upon.

I believe without a doubt that location intelligence is the answer to the challenge Dezenhall described and to some of the greatest challenges that businesses face today. An organization that actively studies geospatial data in the context of its business interests is well positioned to answer the questions he posed, not just in response to a public crisis but perhaps to prevent the crisis from ever happening in the first place.

Moving forward, I don’t think companies will have the option of choosing whether or not to embark on a location intelligence initiative. Either they will jump in and start seeing results, or they will stand back and watch others pass them by.

Michael Gonzales, managing partner of DSS42 LLC, an industry research company specializing in strategy and architecture, was quoted in the Q1 issue of Teradata Magazine as saying, “If you’re not at least at the start of a spatial perspective in your data warehouse, then you’re behind. In the next two to three years, it will be difficult to remain competitive without some spatial perspective.”

Time—and competitors—wait for no one. So go ahead and check out that article to start exploring how location intelligence can transform your business.

Could this be the next big – whoops, it’s already here!

rita zimmerman — 3/3/2010

Spotting trends early-on is the ultimate challenge in marketing. It’s one of the tricks that demand chain management (DCM) solutions can do if they are fed with real-time sales data and leverage powerful analytical capabilities. What makes trend spotting so challenging is the fact that it only makes sense if you manage to do it in a relatively small time frame: the trend must be there but it mustn’t be obvious to everybody yet.

If you want to know what a trend looks like at an early stage, ask Magnus Lindkvist. He identifies trends for a living – in the old-fashioned way, actually walking the high streets and other places, watching people. Click here to see a perfect example from his website. The video demonstrates impressively the various stages in which a trend evolves:

a trend is (usually) started a long time before you can tell whether it will ever become popular
a handful of “first movers” does not automatically mean that there will be a massive breakthrough (albeit it makes it more likely)
once there is a critical mass, the trend is self-sustaining and it attracts more and more attention from bystanders
once people start joining the existent “in-crowd” in larger numbers, it turns into a stampede as nobody wants to miss out

In the video, a successful trend spotter would have to predict the popularity of the dancing at some time between 0:55 and 1:30 (because afterwards, it really is obvious to everybody.) Not so easy, don’t you agree? Well, it’s retailers’ daily business. Economic uncertainty has made consumer demand extremely volatile, which means that retailers need to identify changes quicker than ever to take full advantage of their insights. We are sure that Magnus Lindkvist’s keynote at the Teradata Universe Conference in Berlin will spark some new ideas how to enrich the existing trend analyses in retail as well as in other industries.

Mr. Marketer – Tear Down this Wall

Paul Barrett — 3/2/2010

Mounting research indicates that consumers are not happy with cross-channel experiences – and its hurting business. In the past I have noted research from Forrester and Gartner. This week I saw this article on stores.org. What I love is that consumers are just like my 4 and 5 year old daughters – they subscribe to twitter to get special deals, but they don’t like the fact that prices differ by channel.

        (special discussion this morning at 6am)
        Me: how do you want your pancakes – whole or cut up? Addy: Cut-up.
        Me: Do you want syrup? Addy: no Syrup.
        Me: do you want Butter? Addy; No, no butter
        Me: here are your pancakes. Addy: I don’t want pancakes, I want a bagel.

I digress, but it is relevant. Consumers don’t necessarily know what they want, but they sure know what they don’t want. They don’t want:

To walk into a store and have the associate not be able to see that they are a VIP customer.
To have more information about their profile, loyalty and purchases on their iPhone than the associate has.
To have to get an MBA to understand the company’s myriad excuses for not sharing information across channels
To go back in time - I got brakes today, with a nationwide warranty – but the stores computers are not connected. Connected computers, what is this the Jetsons?

What’s crazy is that this is a huge opportunity for the company.

Money Left on the Table (1): Fifty-five percent of the time, call centers had at least the same info as the website, but didn’t act on it to up-sell and cross-sell.
Money Left on the Table (2): Ninety-three percent of stores could look up pending orders – Pending orders would seem like a great opportunity for up-selling too! Especially if the customer is asking about a pending order.
Money Left on the Table (3): Thirty-five percent of stores didn’t offer in-store pick-up of online orders, yeah, you wouldn’t want those online customers crowding up your store and buying stuff.
Pushing customers away: Refusing to match or honor online prices in stores. Okay, they are different channels, but really why compete against yourself, it is not like there is nobody else to compete against. (See above, customers don’t want to have to understand internal processes).

So companies are missing opportunities and their customers are disappointed. Not quite a win-win. Now, I have worked in big companies and consulted with many. These issues are never that easy to solve. But this seems like a great opportunity to solve an internal problem and drive sales. It is a classic area where technology can be a profit driving investment.

So what to do. Let’s start with what not to do – don’t boil the ocean. The underlying reasons for these issues are complex. The systems involved are complex – and touching the customer experience can be fraught with issues.

I suggest we start with data and transparency. Freeing the data so that it can be accessed across the company and by consumers is critical. Give data to the associates in stores and on the phone so they can be empowered to help customers and drive sales.

Second, integrate online and offline channels to hide complexity from customers – because customers switch between online and offline in real-time. Legacy systems can be a hindrance. But don’t hesitate on this, the payoffs in sales, loyalty and customer information will vastly outstrip any technology investment.

Finally, Listen. Open the doors to customer feedback, learn from your challenges. Build on customer experiences. If they are willing to share, it is important. Give them a channel to express frustration, transform that frustration into engagement.

There is a great win-win opportunity sitting in front of the marketing world. Breaking down the wall between online and offline is the only way for cross-channel marketers to win. Otherwise they are giving away a competitive advantage to online marketers (You didn’t read that here, I will deny it).

Hot off the presses

Sandra Worley — 3/1/2010

The latest issue of Teradata Magazine is online and in the mail this week! In it, we take an extensive look at location intelligence (LI). From business applications to technical implementation, the Q1 issue has it all when it comes to geospatial solutions.

We explore the topic from a business perspective in the cover story, “Pinpoint opportunity.” Being able to answer a business’s “where” questions provides a new dimension of analysis for many organizations. In The View from Here, Teradata Chief Development Officer Scott Gnau astutely draws parallels between businesses’ use of geospatial data to reach their objectives and lab mice searching for cheese in a maze. As he concludes, with LI, “you’ll know exactly where to find your cheese and where it will be tomorrow.”

Transitioning from the benefits of LI to how to make it happen, we discuss the capabilities of Teradata technology in Why Teradata. As authors Arlene Zaima and Ellen Boerger explain, “Companies should make sure the solution they choose offers fast, in-database analysis of integrated traditional EDW and geospatial data.”

Last but not least, Tech2Tech offers some nuts and bolts about geocoding and getting the most out of your geospatial data. Check out Hands On and “Planning a route to location intelligence.”

Top to bottom, this issue maps out a course to geospatial insight.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

InformationWeek’s “10 Most Strategic IT Vendors” Includes Teradata

Darryl McDonald — 3/4/2010

I am a big sports fan, and have watched the Vancouver Olympics Games every chance I get. It energizes me to see the amazing athletes and their families get recognition for their years of practice and dedication.

Now, while no one will confuse me with an Olympic athlete, Teradata can indeed claim some similarities, as we regularly are named in prestigious awards. Our most recent recognition was being named as one of InformationWeek’s “10 Most Strategic IT Vendors.” One of the truly great aspects of this award was being called out for the customer focus that we all work so hard to achieve every day.

“Marquee customers,” wrote Editor-in-Chief Rob Preston, “attribute much of their success to the competitive intelligence they mine through their ‘partnership’ (and that's the word they use most often) with this leading data warehouse and analytics software vendor.”

Our customers are an ever present key element in our success. Gartner cited our relationships with customers in its announcement of the current Data Warehousing Magic Quadrant. Additionally, British journalist Mark Whitehorn captured Teradata’s customer focus in an article he wrote after attending our customer-led user group conference, named PARTNERS. Top Teradata executives, he wrote, “are walking around the conference, talking to their customers. Get on a conference bus to go to the evening's entertainment and Stephen (CTO Brobst) or Mike Koehler (president and CEO) is likely to get on and sit in any spare seat and talk to the customers who happen to be there. My experience is that this is unheard of in a company with revenues of $1.76 billion (2008).These guys probably don't have a mission statement that talks about customer engagement; they do it instead. Is this behavior admirable? I think so, but the laudability isn't really that important. What is important is that the customers love it and, in return, give their loyalty.”

As the Olympics come to a close, the athletes will return to their homes and bask in their achievement. We at Teradata will keep working with our customers for their success. When they win, we win.

I Am Erin Brockovich, Hear Me Roar!

Colleen Quinn — 2/25/2010

I love Zappos. Love them. Every pair of shoes I own, almost without exception, has been purchased from Zappos. The same is true with my son’s shoes. Every pair. And, I haven’t always been the easiest Zappos customer. My return rate (thanks to the most liberal return policy on the planet, with free return shipping) is about 50%.

I once bought a pair of boots from Zappos last minute before a winter trip to Finland (brrr), only to discover, under the Northern Lights, the boots were too big. I had to wear them to ensure I returned back to Southern California with my feet intact. And, when I got home, I asked if I could return them—worn and all. After a polite “our policy says the shoes should be unworn,” I was extended a store credit. With free return shipping of the worn merchandise. And, the entire discussion took place over chat!

Soon after that, I was invited to be a Zappos VIP! So excited, I tweeted the good news. Moments later, a tweet came in reply. From @Zappos_service, saying simply “We love you too! Welcome to VIP!”

Talk about a company doing everything right: making my experience easy, being flexible on policy, and being absolutely forward thinking in their use of social media to monitor how consumers are responding to their brand. It was enlightening, and it motivated me to buy another pair of shoes. :-)

So, yesterday when I was in a funk, I tweeted my love and appreciation for Zappos again. I wanted to reward a company for taking care of their customers, because I was embroiled in a dispute with a company who seemed to do just the opposite.

I’ve been engaged in my own personal consumer protection war this week. I’ve been a bit of an Erin Brockovich, and I’m not letting it go. I believe I am a victim of the egregious use of bait-and-switch pricing by one of the US’s leading online travel services companies. And--given the size of the company I’m tangoing with-- if I am, it’s likely you might be too. This is a big company—a more than $1BN company.

Here’s the story—I needed to book an international business trip, more than a month in advance. I am looking for a balance of competitive pricing and decent itinerary. (I’m not the kind of gal who likes to spend 24-hours in an airport for the sake of a few bucks). My own corporate travel options seem limited or even overpriced. So, I decide to be prudent with my company’s money and check the major online travel services for better deals. I check the usual suspects: Travelocity, Expedia, Kayak, etc.

I settle on the one which seems to have the best deals for my dates. The itinerary is good, the deal is smokin’: $800 +/- for a roundtrip fare. And, the offer clearly states there are multiple seats left. I’ll take it. I grab my credit card and click to the next screen. I choose my return itinerary, which doesn’t alter the fare. I’m ready to transact. Then, bam, the screen refreshes. A polite warning message informs me the itinerary has been re-priced. It’s now an unreasonable $2400. How did that happen? A glitch, I assume.

I try again. Same result. I wait a day. The route is still available, the price remains listed at $803. I select the route to transact. Another “price jump.”

“Price Jump” is the CEO’s phrase to describe what is, in my estimation, bait and switch. How do I know this is the CEO’s phrase? Because I emailed him directly. (You can find just about anything online these days). I emailed him after I wasted an hour on the phone the call center who: 1) refused to offer me real names of the attendants to whom I spoke; 2) also refused to provide ticket numbers to monitor our communications; and 3) offered some pathetic excuse that the systems don’t synch rapidly enough. The first two are just terrible customer the service. The third is an outright fib.

I tested my theory multiple times over multiple days—taking screen prints of each price jump. Then, I sent my email. I was impressed to receive a response within six-hours, even signed with the first name of my now BFF of a CEO. I was politely directed to executive resolutions, and a warm apology was offered for the poor customer service. I pressed the issue…. I couldn’t care less about the service. I wanted to know about the money.

At the outset of this incident, before emailing my BFF, I tweeted my experience and anger. No “I love you;” no acknowledgement of the issue. Nothing. I wonder if this company has any idea of their brand’s perception in the marketplace? Or, perhaps they have the luxury of not having to worry, unless the CEO tells them to. I’d worry. When I Googled the name of this company, and the words “bait-and-switch” or even “price change,” I got over a million hits. There are, it seems, lots of disgruntled customers.

And, in an era where the Voice of the Customer can be heard loud and clear, I’d strongly recommend these guys start listening. Some of my favorite companies make a regular habit of monitoring blog posts and tweets for telling comments about their brands and services. Zappos is certainly the most zealous, but we I’m currently followed by a number of companies who care about what I have to say. There are rich tools on the market, combined with powerful analytics, enable companies to make sense of their brand in the marketplace, and better, make proactive business decisions about how to spend ad dollars and align marketing efforts.

I guess my travel company hasn’t learned this yet. The back-and-forth dialog with them was interminable. The only remedy? A voucher for my next trip—as if I will ever consider using this service again! That, and a continuing implausible dismissal of the systemic problem as a “glitch.” Glitch? Not likely. This morning I tested again with different dates, different locations—same price jumping results.

I’m frustrated to say the least. But, I know one thing for sure. When I opened Twitter this morning, I saw my love note from Zappos posted in reply.

“@colleenquinn Aww! Thanks for the love you made me blush! ;-) (Secret= We love you too! But...Shhhh....Don't Wanna Make Everyone Jealous)!”

Now, that’s a company even Erin Brockovich can love.

(Check-out Zappos_Service tweets in response to customer posts at: http://twitter.com/Zappos_Service)

Bound for Berlin, to the Teradata Universe

David Placke — 3/1/2010

We are several weeks into the new year already and optimism is slightly returning to Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The economy is trying to recover around the world. New opportunities arise while business cases for better insight analytics are more compelling than ever.

Currently, we are in the run-up to this year’s Teradata Universe in Berlin. In the coming weeks, we want to give you a taste of what we have been preparing. Among the multitude of sessions, keynotes and presentations that our visitors are accustomed to, there will be a special focus on the automobile industry this year. A joint study by the European Business School and Teradata has clearly shown that supply chain management in the automotive industry could be significantly enhanced with data warehousing – and help carmakers operate more profitably.

What about other industries? Let’s have a look at retail, certainly one of the most competitive of all industries. Mr. Silvester Macho of Metro, one of our long-standing customers in Europe, has agreed to deliver a keynote address in Berlin to tell us what Teradata has done for them in recent months.

For Teradata, web analytics is one of this year’s hottest topics. This is because a) more and more commerce is going online and b) Teradata’s recently introduced Extreme Performance Appliance 4555, using the power of SSD technology, makes real-time analyses of browsing behaviour much easier and more affordable. Together with some of our partners, we have recently been investing a lot of time in this field, and I am sure our debates in Berlin will help to take us and our customers even further.

So let me take this opportunity to invite you to attend the Teradata Universe Conference 2010.

Hermann Wimmer
President, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Teradata Corporation

Healthcare Information Systems Need ADW Therapy!

Darryl McDonald — 2/23/2010

Healthcare information systems everywhere are on the operating table. Some are in intensive care. I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV, but I can tell you without a doubt that the growing pain and pressure in healthcare information systems is best treated by the leader in fast-acting enterprise intelligence – Teradata.

Teradata’s time-tested and proven ADW therapy has helped many businesses recover from IDS (Intelligence Deficit Syndrome) – deadly to companies in hypercompetitive markets. IDS is characterized by episodes of blindness to opportunity, disintegration of processes, inaccurate reporting – and an inability to make fully informed decisions. Okay, most of us know that ADW means Active Data Warehousing – Teradata’s approach to delivering detailed intelligence in real time – to those on the operational front lines who need it most.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, I do want to make a serious point. In healthcare today, the need for near-real time analytical intelligence has never been greater. As our elected representatives struggle to modernize healthcare, let this be understood: one sure way to improve the quality, cost and delivery of healthcare is to raise the quality of intelligence used by healthcare providers, planners, payors and product makers. The Teradata approach is all about raising visibility to those users of intelligence – and it is already being done.

Kaiser Permanente, the largest HMO in the US, is completing a Teradata ADW to integrate claims, eligibility, pharmacy, prescription and other medical data from multiple systems into one centralized access point. It is used to integrate and mine clinical data to better understand the causes of disease – and find cures.
Highmark, a Blues health plan, is using its Teradata system to identify and fight health care fraud and abuse in near-real time. They have dramatically improved reporting and trend monitoring and are expanding the system to include proactive health management – creating personal wellness programs.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is building a data platform to maintain a clear line of sight on its operations and transactions – a single, integrated data repository from Teradata. Tracking claims processing records with this platform empowers CMS to detect and thwart fraud, waste and abuse.

We are sure that the ADW approach, extended to other federal healthcare agencies would further improve the quality and cost of healthcare. Integrating data from all government healthcare entities such as HHS, SSA, VA and DoD would accelerate best practices and knowledge discovery. One priority example would be the realization of the VA’s Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record – implementing a Teradata ADW to serve all VA and DoD beneficiaries.

I am not saying that a Teradata system will solve all healthcare problems. But by raising the intelligence of the core systems that feed, manage, analyze and deliver information to millions of healthcare professionals, these experts will have the detailed visibility to collaborate and resolve problems. Someone said “ignorance can be fixed.” Absolutely – with intelligence. As an experienced practitioner in this field, I strongly recommend ADW Therapy.

Sign this contract here: its all free...Or is it?

David Placke — 2/24/2010

In previous years, Federal Government agencies have been given riding instructions to get the cheapest, "all you can eat" licensing bundles that provide economies of scale and cheap costs per unit. The world has changed, however. Where once the salesman who asked you if you wanted to buy a watch and get some free steak-knives was a friend, he is now steering you away from success.

The Gershon Review into IT in Australian Federal Government illustrated the need to demonstrate and measure efficiency and effectiveness in IT BAU and projects. Gershon also left the book open for Government to write the next chapter: identify efficiency savings and re-invest 50% into new capability building projects. Important to this process is being able to itemise costs, drill-down into just how many and how much of something is needed or can be reduced and demonstrate just enough to do the job efficiently and effectively. The identified savings are the key to being entrusted with new public monies to build capability. If this is not done, restructures, diminishing funding bases and a dissolved role for branches and divisions will ensue.

In the new wave of transparent Western Democracy, the transparent, lean and mean IT Divisions will be entrusted with public monies to enrich society and provide ROI to the taxpayer. These successful groups will be, more than ever before, reliant on contracts to help them achieve this result.

Returning to the proposition of the "all you can eat” contract, this model most likely cannot achieve Gershon's vision. Buying enterprise infrastructure and software licenses where there are lists of products, services and infrastructure without associated costs will be the biggest impediment to organisations achieving measured savings.

The acid test for an organisation is if they can switch off a server, data mart, license or service to result in real, immediate and measured savings. If an agency cannot do this, their model needs to change to respond to the new environment. Teradata offers a range of services to help organisations realise efficiencies, including a data mart consolidation service. Agencies can work with industry partners like Teradata to find and harvest savings from inefficient and ineffective data management strategies. Again, these services can only help organisations if the product or service being trimmed-down can be measured.

When negotiating large, enterprise agreements, agencies will have to demand granular costs, down to the unit, hour or fixed price for service level. There may be a trade-off in moving from a veiled cost model which suits large vendors and reductions in service levels, licenses and quantities. This, however, is the world of "just what you need", and being able to measure and demonstrate that not "all you can eat".

David Bremstaller

Moments of Truth vs. Customer Journey

Paul Barrett — 2/22/2010

I have been immersed in Powerpoint land lately. One of my favorite quotes is from Vint Cerf, who I worked with in the mid-90’s, “Power Corrupts, Powerpoint corrupts absolutely”

Since powerpoint is the lingua franca of most of the business world all out thoughts need to be reduced either to four 12pt font bullet points, a single picture with a pithy word or some animation that makes kindergarten drawings look like Monet.

My challenge is communicating the power of integrating web data into the data warehouse to drive new marketing performance and ingenuity. In my last post I noted that the customer experience is often found painfully lacking when customers use multiple channels. Over 40% of customers rate cross-channel sales and service interactions as poor or very poor, according the Forrester. (subscription needed).

What I have found is that when we talk about channels, we only see moments of truth – and when we look cross-channel we see a customer journey. A channel has too many blind spots to really provide a good view of the customer journey. Let’s look at an example of a negative customer journey - I’m talking to you Southwest and Kevin Smith.

Its clear that this was a great example of a web-based customer dialogue. A customer complains and the company responds. In front of millions of people – all of it documented in online data. Here are just some of the data points.

Twitter post – Post, Date/time stamp, Sender
Kevin Smith Social Network – (facebook, Twitter, SMODCAST subscribers etc. 1.6 million twitter followers alone)
Geospatial data – geospatial information about the airport
Southwests multi-step CRM outreach – phone, e-mail, letter, tweet
ReTweet traffic

Showing the data is complex enough – but what about the outcome? When we discuss examples like this, we want answers.

Customer is saved + customer lifetime value
Change in overall revenue
Success of PR strategy in mitigating the risks?
Did Southwest have to incur new costs – ie advertising campaign?

In reality the result is mixed and somewhat unknown. Will Kevin Smith fly Southwest again (I am on the edge of my seat waiting to hear, LOL ) . What happened to Southwest’s revenue in the following days / weeks.

This is to some extent the tipping point for the integration of social media and CRM – or Social CRM. But it really is a very limited but at the same time complex example. This is just the data fall out from one customer story.

When we shift from moments of truth to the customer journey we greatly expand the volume of the data, but also the increase value of the data. Because moments of truth don’t happen in a vacuum, they happen within the marketplace. And the marketplace is constantly shifting and changing and made up of (to misquote Carl Sagan) billions and billions of moments of truth. And around each of these moments of truth are little data solar systems made up of data matter from websites, call centers, point of sales, social media. Often you can draw a straight line from a customer complaint to a particular experience. Like we did with the Kevin Smith example.

But when marketers that want to improve the customer experience and reap the benefits of higher revenue from loyalty, higher spending more repeat visits, they need to have a more sophisticated business intelligence strategy. They have to be able to simultaneously grasp the details and impacts of individual moments of truth – and see the bigger picture that puts these moments in context.

Which brings me back to the limitations of powerpoint. When we talk about complex-cross channel issues we have to have a dynamic, fascinating story that reaches out to many perspectives. The challenges is in the complexity of audience. Some people get the big picture and want to know what the steps are to take action, some want to understand how exactly a tweet ends up driving a CRM response, with no time for these . 30,000 foot slides – how do you match a tweet with an email address they want to know. And others don’t want to get caught up in all this technical mumbo jumbo – hide the complexity, make it simple.

So we corrupt the story to the tool. Is it corrupting me – or I it?

Getting your head around the clouds and SaaS

Sandra Worley — 2/18/2010

Cloud computing is all the rage in IT and business circles these days. Many industry analysts and publications are touting it as the next big thing in technology. But for some, the concept and implementation options are cloudy at best. What it is? Is it right for my organization? Which approach should I take?

The Q1 issue of Teradata Magazine, which goes live next week, offers answers.

The Insider’s Warehouse article by Dan Graham, who leads Teradata’s Active Data Warehouse Technical Marketing, delivers an outstanding overview of the subject. It explains a view of working definitions and the cloud computing service models types then goes on to compare and contrast public and private clouds. Also included are details on Teradata’s offerings in this area.

Software as a service (SaaS) is another topic making the news. In the feature “Buy or rent,” Hydus Inc. CTO Sharma Anupindi and Director of Delivery Centers Anand Rajaram outlines a process to empirically examine whether a SaaS business intelligence (BI) approach or a more traditional buy-and-build strategy would better meet an organization’s needs. A proper exploration contemplates both affordability and complexity factors.

In the end, cloud computing and SaaS provide compelling options for those willing and able to proactively examine the alternatives. Those that don’t will see opportunity blow right by.

Mike Westholder
Managing Editor
Teradata Magazine

Data Glut? The Answer Is Innovation

Darryl McDonald — 2/15/2010

Data is piling up fast at almost every business, from financial corporations to online shopping sites. Security log files, network events, transaction records. e-mail and more are flooding firms with information.

International Data Corp. reports that the digital universe will hit 1.8 zettabytes (a zettabyte is 1 billion terabytes) by 2011. That’s a tenfold increase in the next five years. IDC says growth is running at an annual rate of 60 percent. And the cost of data management is significant as pointed out in a recent CIO article by Michael Friedenberg.

What can a company do with it all? You can’t just delete it, because regulations say you have to keep it around. So some companies just store it. Others shovel it from one place to another. But smart companies are leveraging the information with innovative systems and using it to shape their strategy going forward.

At Teradata we’re committed to innovation that’s keeping companies a couple of steps out in front of the data information glut. Teradata 13, our latest data warehouse database, reveals our deep commitment to engineering excellence that provides a powerful system to work with the wide variety of data that are pounding enterprise IT data systems. It takes smarts and performance to navigate these challenges from the large volumes of data hitting us from all directions.

Literally: a new source of data is geographic information from the recent explosion of geographic location data thanks to Web navigation sites like Google Earth and GPS (Global Positioning System) devices embedded in cars, cell phones and portable navigation units. This location data is critical to analyzing business trends and customer activity. And Teradata 13 data warehouse along with other tools in our arsenal helps businesses collect GPS data and make sense of it. After all, what’s the use of having data unless you can make sense of it in a meaningful way that helps grow your business. What is your data information glut challenge? We’d like to hear about it.

Related news: For the 8th time, Teradata is one of the Intelligent Enterprise “Dozen”, the most influential vendors for the intelligent enterprise. Teradata is cited for innovation, leadership and in-depth understanding of “what customers need to do to take full advantage of information”. See the full story at http://bit.ly/a0jJKF

Get to the point

David Placke — 2/15/2010

I’m not particularly a fan of Tennis but I’m originally from Scotland so took a keen interest in the recent Australian Open and cheered for fellow Scot, Andy Murray.

I’ve come to realise in recent years how in Australia we have an increasing tendency to drag out awards ceremonies for major sporting events. I really felt for Andy Murray in particular as he stood (im)patiently waiting to receive his runners up award and was then asked to make a speech when clearly all he wanted was to get out of there.

It made me think of how time poor everyone seems nowadays, particularly at work and how I imagine people sitting in business presentations, particularly the presentation of analytic findings, just wanting the presenter to get on with it.

I’m currently attending a course on dashboard design and information presentation principals, “Show me the numbers” by Stephen Few and one of the key principals we keep coming back to is how information should be easy to comprehend, the presentation of it should be intuitive and easy to understand ‘at a glance’. Stephen referred to Paul Grice and the Gricean Maxims of which I particularly liked the Maxim of manner, point 3: Be brief.

Stephen showed a video of Hans Rosling presenting at TED in 2006 (the 2010 show is on now where he enthusiastically presents what is essentially an animated bubble scatterplot chart (pretty complex) to debunk the view of the developed world as long life, small family and the developing world as short life, large family. Watch the presentation from approx 3.30 for 1.5 mins and at that point you’ll hear him claim “we have a completely new world”. Quite a claim, but after 1.5 mins you are convinced. That’s getting on with it! It’s how he tells the story.

When presenting or demonstrating I’m also a fan of Peter Cohans mantra to “do the last thing first”. Not only are we time poor, but we are programmed to forget, as Peter pointed out in a recent blog. Quite simply people remember the first and last things they are shown.

When presenting game changing or contentious hypotheses, as many of our customers do, its very easy to feel the need to show all the intricate details of the model they developed along the way (weren’t we always told “show your work” in maths class?). By the time they get to the punch line, if they get there at all, the audience has been lost or the meeting has been hijacked and no action will come out of it.

Make the point and make it easy. It’s an extension of the “tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them” idea but gets straight to the point.

“Show me the numbers” does not trivialize extensive research. Analysts should resist the need to justify themselves and their skills with a pre-punch line thesis. Getting straight to the point will invite engaged conversation and a stronger buy in of a hypothesis or at the very least a robust discussion and testing of the model.

The very fact that the analyst has created a robust and well researched model will come out in the ensuing discussion giving ample time to “show the working’ but this time to an engaged and interested audience. Of course you probably needed and used good data, great sophisticated processing and modeling engines and that’s where Teradata comes in!

I would love to hear or see examples of complex information being presented quickly, succinctly and the impact or result it had.

Alec Gardner
Area Presales Manager
www.linkedin.com/in/alecgardner

Customer Satisfaction Analytics Without Data Borders

Paul Barrett — 2/11/2010

“The key to customer retention is customer satisfaction.” – Phillip Kotler

I was reading the most recent Forrester review of customer satisfaction (subscription needed) . And I was thinking about just how hard it is to understand customer satisfaction the way we as marketers look at it today. The customer is typically so far from the discussion that we measure everything but satisfaction.

Our satisfaction measurement and management capabilities are all focused around machines that are not connected across experience touch-points and research that happens with varying degrees of immediacy and context.

	Online	Call Center	Store or Branch
What do we manage	Page Load Times	Average Speed of Answer Average Hold Time	Associate activities
How do we measure	Weblogs Post-visit surveys 3rd Party Tools ACD reports	ACD reports Quality Assurance (1% sampling) Net Promoter Score 3rd party Tools	Mystery shopping Surveys Research 3rd Party Tools
Where is the customer	*Using all of these at different times and sometimes the same time.*

But what does this have to do with Data Integration? Interestingly a separate Forrester report showed that Improved Customer Satisfaction was the leading reason for driving web and offline data integration. In What’s Your Web Data Integration Strategy? (subscription) by John Lovett – 52% of respondents answered the question “In which of the following areas have you obtained positives results from analyzing your company data via and integrated solution?” with Customer Satisfaction.

In today’s multi-channel world with myriads of choices, thousands of daily messages and incredible access to information customer expectations are higher than ever. And with competition, personalization and improved channel performance, they will keep going up.

Let’s look at shopping cart abandonment. According to Paypal some of the biggest drivers of abandoned shopping carts have to do with offline processes – 22% want customer support, but couldn’t find it; 26% want to shop offline and 46% are concerned about delivery costs (Comscore 2009). Other reasons in other survey’s point to out of stock issues or even delivery options. These are reasons for lost sales that all cross the border between bricks and clicks.

And as customers choose many channels our current methods of divining customer satisfaction based in channel technologies and tied to specific channel interactions we are losing the customers perspective. Too many companies still look at 1st call resolution as a key call center metric – but most calls today are preceded by multiple self-service attempts online and on IVR’s. So usually the first “call” is a 3rd or fourth touch of the same problem. Even a perfect resolution may not give that agent a good score on satisfaction if the website or IVR were difficult to work with.

New more holistic approaches are needed, but without turning upside down the channel performance metrics. Satisfaction has to looked at beyond channel performance – but channel optimization is still critical to delivering a good customer experience.

Data can be a key part of the answer – maybe even the answer for some situations. Is your Promoter Score dropping – look at integrated data for root cause analysis. Are your talk times long because customers are complaining about your website to your agents – look for data to pinpoint problems in self help systems – and pass information on to agents to speed calls and improve satisfaction. Is there a breakdown between conversion and activation or usage – look at the data links between the website and fulfillment systems.

Teradata principle consultant Bob Bender did incredible work for one client by linking call records from IVR’s, Agents and Transfers to create a single interaction record across the call center - the client could see the entire customer experience in one set of data. Very cool stuff.

Customers are demanding Customer Satisfaction Sans Frontiers. Companies need to breakdown these silos that act like Iron Curtains between online and offline to really understand, manage and measure the customer experience. (BTW, you can donate to Doctors without Borders here)

And Now a Brief Aside WebTrends Engage Conference (Note to self, get Super Bowl related comments published before the game is over – Go Saints!)

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” William Burroughs, “Howl”

NOLA, IGNITE and (Webtrends) ENGAGE… In the Big Easy it was like Mardi Gras and the Superbowl all rolled into one… Okay, that is next week but it was still pretty exciting in New Orleans this week. Local’s are just wishing it was Sunday, with the Saints in the Superbowl no one can think about anything else… (spoiler alert the Saints won)

Some of the best analytical minds of the generation descended into New Orleans for one of the most fascinating conference formats I have had a chance to experience. By placing Ignite on center stage on Topics from Branding to Guilt Free Crime to iPhone Philanthropy, the conference focused in on the core principles behind the idea. And I think the format really works for analytics and transforming analytics from pretty charts and graphs to action and automation.

But what was really impressive, was the increase in interest in integrating web data in to the enterprise analytics environment. That has really taken off and customer seem very excited about the possibilities.

One a additional aside: I had dinner at Dick and Jenny’s in Uptown where they contributed 10% to relief efforts in Haiti. Even in the midst of the Saints craziness, just four years removed from Katrina, karma and compassion for others – cool.