Well, it looks like innovation is the main positive and hopeful business topic for year-end 2008.

Industry and academic heavyweights are giving speeches and publishing articles, calling for more innovation and offering new dimensions for innovation. It’s the core of America’s competitiveness, says one. It’s measured by how many Ph.D.’s are graduating from US schools, says another. Nonsense, says still another, America’s marketing savvy counts, too. It’s not just what you invent, it’s what you do with it. Other voices say America’s competitiveness depends on innovation and the winners will be those who are global and open with their innovation efforts, learning from pools of talent abroad and blending homegrown and international skills to hone innovation.

Wow. And into this mix comes the new issue of Teradata Magazine that focuses on – you guessed it – innovation. I hope you’ll all read the magazine. It’s full of provocative and thought-filled articles. It’s available online at http://www.teradata.com/tdmo/.

For me, there are three things that illustrate Teradata’s enduring commitment to innovation. One fits the currently fashionable notion of disruption. We were the original disruptors in analytics with massively parallel processing.

Second, we were the first to use “active data warehousing” to refer to near-real-time analytics that bring business intelligence tools to the front lines of business, from the strategic to the operational. We were way ahead of the pack on this.

Now, Teradata has innovated again with the launch of the Teradata Accelerate packages. As Chris Preimesberger wrote in eWeek on November 18, “Data warehouses are the aircraft carriers of the data storage world. It takes time to acquire, build, stock, launch and deploy a data warehouse. However, Teradata is challenging this notion with Accelerate, a customized, bundled package of hardware, software and services that can enable companies to rapidly deploy a data warehouse.”

Teradata Accelerate packages are low cost, quick time-to-value and easy one-stop shopping for data warehousing, opening Teradata’s promise to all.
Visit http://teradata.com/Accelerate for more information.

Now that’s innovation anyone can love.

As Teradata's CMO, I realize I can probably wrap my arms around the technical aspects of data warehousing (DW) more easily than CMOs in other industries. After all, concepts like scalability and ETL can be a lot to absorb, especially when you're focusing on market share and lead qualification.

But there are some DW tools that pertain to the marketer as much as to the analyst. In fact, a few are worth "going techie" for since they can make us marketers look really good. Take data visualization, where the ultimate goal is to communicate clearly and quickly. Sounds like marketing, doesn't it?

Data visualization makes it easy to see the big picture that's buried in complex data, with all of the relevant info blended to create a single dashboard or map. Just what we need to keep our efforts on the right track — or move forward on new tracks. And since 70% of our perceptions are visual, this tool helps us promote our ideas across the organization. You get the picture.

Visualization tools also give us display choices so we can spot trends and determine the most actionable conclusions. In fact, they've been known to answer questions you haven't even thought to ask yet. Now that's powerful stuff.

Take this Tableau visualization, which analyzes revenue. The thickness of (as well as the label on) each bar represents the average order size for that segment of the business. If you look at the grand total, you can see that most sales are from accounts classified as new business but that the largest orders tend to come from add-on business. With such an analysis of data from a CRM system, management can determine next action steps and explain it as well.

click to enlarge

Data visualization gurus Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge and Edward Tufte (the "da Vinci of Data") are influencing data warehousing and marketing with advances in this field. Teradata is fortunate that some of our partners are keeping us at the top of the hot visualization space, which includes our traditional Enterprise BI partners as well as independent visualization companies. These partners include SAS, SAP's Business Objects, Oracle, MicroStrategy, Microsoft, and IBM's Cognos as well as Tibco's Spotfire, Tableau Software, BIS2, Bally Technologies and ADVIZOR Solutions.

I'll keep you posted as this eye-opening technology continues to make its mark on our field.

Now, I can't make any promises and wouldn't dream of offering any forecasts. But behind all those gloom-and-doom headlines and talk show rants, there's another set of forces at work. It's pretty quiet right now, but it's there, and it's growing.

A recent Wall Street Journal headline shrieked about risk models failing "to pass real-world tests." The article says that the models didn't factor in some critical, detailed information and so, failed to help in today's reality.

Yet, a Teradata customer — a major bank — has quietly improved its risk management. The bank used to have data scattered across multiple silos and could only report its risk position with 75% accuracy. Since integrating its data and implementing a Teradata Enterprise Risk Management solution, its decision makers have a comprehensive view of risk exposure across all product lines and business units. This bank's managers now take action on risk factors knowing that their data is accurate.

On another front, the noise level is getting louder and louder as retailers gear up for what most seem to think will be a weak holiday shopping season.

Again, fairly quietly and effectively, some of our customers are using analytics running on Teradata to tightly manage their supply and demand chains, to prevent fraud and to make highly tailored offers to their customers ... all in order to keep ahead of their competitors.

In the B2B space, some pundits would have us believe that full-blown doom has hit and will be with us for months or, worse yet, years to come. Yet, another customer has been able to measure real revenue growth and customer retention lift from its use of a Teradata customer management solution that has paid for its investment more than 20x.

Sure, these are tough economic times and will probably get tougher. But if I look at the world through Teradata-orange-colored glasses, I see opportunity, not just crisis.

More than 160 journalists, analysts, bloggers and academicians from throughout the world were among the over 3,400 people who attended the Teradata PARTNERS Conference this year. These headlines – from articles and blogs that they wrote from the event – give a good overview of the PARTNERS 2008 story. Click on each headline to get the full article or blog. Taken together, these headlines alone tell the story. Read the articles and you will get a panoramic view of the energy, excitement and learning that filled each day. Hundreds of stories have been published around the world so far. These headlines give you some of those. They make for good reading. And there are more coming.

Looking forward to seeing everyone in Washington D.C. next year!

Data Warehousing Takes Center Stage

Teradata: Confident and Competitive

Teradata creates elite club for petabyte-plus data warehouse customers
'Petabyte Power Players' include eBay, Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Dell, unnamed bank

Teradata looking to high-tech sensors
Sensors the size of a grain of sand that cost less than a jellybean will be able to collect data, official says.

Teradata releases 50 petabyte data warehousing appliance

Teradata Eyes Rivals in Data Warehouse Space with New Appliance

Teradata Bows Petabyte-Scale Appliance, Faster Database
Extreme Data Appliance 1550 meets super-high-scale analysis, compliance and archival demands. Teradata 13 database virtualizes storage, speeds loading and boosts performance.

Teradata Bullish on SSDs

Teradata promises era of affordable petabyte processing with new product offerings

Teradata Partners — Finding Value in Data Warehousing

Teradata Partners — Getting Ready for Harry Potter

What a day! Over 3,000 people focused on the best of data warehousing all in one place, at the same time. Opening day of PARTNERS is always jam-packed, but yesterday was even more so. Customers began presenting their latest innovations using Teradata and we made several significant announcements.

Two things hit me as especially significant:

One was the start of my day, the inaugural ComputerWorld Enterprise Intelligence Awards, sponsored by Teradata. This morning, the top winners in each category were: Discover Financial Services for Integrated View of the Business, eBay for Excellence in BI and Analytics, Hallmark Cards for Customer Intelligence and Management, and Medco Health Solutions for Industry Innovation.

And with our significant announcements made from PARTNERS yesterday, including the industry-leading Teradata 13 database and the powerful new Teradata Extreme Data Appliance, I had a realization that kept growing in importance the more I thought about it during this busy day. It was the WOW factor for me this day: Teradata has announced more innovations in the one year since becoming independent than ever before.

WOW.

Well, our annual Teradata PARTNERS is almost here, coming just after Teradata marks its one-year anniversary as an independent company.  It has been such a great year and I thank all of our customers, partners, employees and friends who have made us so successful.   Teradata is all about innovation and as I look at the line-up this year of folks speaking about their Teradata solutions, I am blown away.  There are more than 200 sessions that will focus on our customers’ innovative practices, partnership stories, and executive challenges.

 

I was looking at the line-up of presentations by customers.  It will be hard to decide this year.   RBC, eBay and Industrial & Commercial Bank of China will give us updates on how their solutions have grown.  Retailing leaders like METRO AG, Office Depot and JC Penney and leading manufacturers like Hershey and Freescale Semiconductor will surely draw crowds to learn from these leaders.   Make sure you check out the Sabre Holdings, Travelocity and Harrah’s Entertainment sessions as they will highlight how they use Teradata to win against competitors.  Other innovators – including AT&T Mobility and Meredith Corporation, WellPoint, Kaiser Permanente, and WebMD – will, I’m sure, have standing room only at their sessions.

 

I will be particularly interested in hearing Dan Ariely of MIT as he shares with us how people make decisions, the forces that shape decisions and what it all means for business innovation and strategy. And I definitely won’t miss Lance Armstrong’s talk about how to overcome challenges and the work it requires to be great.  Can you believe he’s going back to the Tour?  Impressive.  I hope he’ll tell us more about that decision.

 

There’ll be a concert by the Goo Goo Dolls, who will no doubt sing their official Olympics song.  We’ll build bicycles for donation to kids through the Andre Agassi Boys and Girls Club in Las Vegas.  And, as part of our “Math Matters to Teradata” program, we’ll collect math-related school supplies that will also go to deserving kids in the area.

 

We’ll learn a lot, do some good…and we’ll have some fun, too…hope to see you there!

There They Go Again – that’s what came to mind as I heard of the HP Oracle database machine about which Oracle’s database organization has been touting our demise for years; however, businesses have been choosing Teradata instead of Oracle for business intelligence and analytics, and we now have hundreds of happy customers who prefer Teradata over their OLTP database of choice.

Two years ago and again last year, HP bragged about its “Teradata killer” when it introduced Neoview and even put out press releases wrongly implying that they were replacing us with a few customers. That wasn’t happening and still isn’t.

Now these two behemoths have to join together to try to do what they’ve failed to accomplish on their own. Because we respect our competitors, we’ll look at the Oracle-HP machine very thoroughly and will have more to say soon.

For now, I have to say, there they go again. They were wrong before and we’ll prove them wrong again.

Innovation is a hot topic these days.  That’s a good thing since it’s hard for many companies to continue to innovate in the midst of a difficult economy.   

Consider just a few examples of the attention innovation is getting.  One new book worries that innovation is dead and another hails disruption as the best source of innovation.  Fortune magazine’s tech guru David Kirkpatrick was interviewed during the magazine’s Brainstorm conference in July.  Asked what’s his brainstorm from the conference, he said it’s that customers are becoming the main source of innovation.  “Every single person” talked about this, he said, and managing it can be “tempestuous.”  In August, in one of his “Deal Maker” blogs, Vinnie Mirchandani was “staggered” when he learned that a tech company exec thinks innovation has lost meaning. 

At Teradata, we believe in balance – leverage disruption and keep working with customers on what they need next.  We work to keep our innovation and development engine consistently going by getting input from leading-edge customers and by leveraging disruption.  We work with customers of all sizes and levels of sophistication on what they’ll be doing in 3, 5 or 10 years to help guide the next innovation. 

Disruption for its own sake doesn’t have any staying power.  Bringing greater value to customers does. 

Why is it that – all evidence to the contrary – some people still insist that being data-driven is the exclusive province of large enterprises? Sure, industry giants are using data warehousing solutions to slice and dice their data. But that doesn’t mean that the technology is any less appropriate for small and midsize companies.

If being smaller means that organizations can withstand fewer body blows than companies with deep pockets, then making fast, smart decisions is that much more critical – especially in the current economy. Even tiny improvements in decision making velocity and effectiveness can help an organization succeed over its competition.

Compared with older systems that only collected data about what happened, today's data warehousing technology lets companies big and small analyze and understand why it happened, too. The best data warehousing appliances harness the power of leading-edge enterprise-class solutions, but they can be cost-justified within just months. We've seen the results firsthand: Teradata's clients are market leaders involved in data warehouse projects of all sizes and complexity.

So why does the correlation between data warehousing and large enterprises persist? Maybe it’s because with a Teradata system clever small and midsize companies are quietly building their successes – improving operations and becoming more competitive. They aren’t looking for the kudos or the press coverage – they’re happy to gain the business benefits that naturally accrue from making smarter decisions.

It’s exciting to be in the data warehousing and analytics business. For Teradata, I’m delighted that customers and partners continue to express strong support for our platform family and I’m not surprised that competitors continue their squawking.  

For example, a couple of competitors claim to be winning market share from Teradata.  One said its win rate against Teradata is more than 50 percent.  We dispute the claim, of course…what I don’t understand is why some media seem to accept claims without any substantiation. So, in a spirit of helping our journalist friends, I’d like to offer some suggestions for covering claims about wins and win rates.   

First, ask tougher questions and ask for proof when vendors make claims about market share and win rates.  Second, get a clear definition of win rate and what gets calculated as being in the “game.”  Win rates are meaningless unless there is a clear definition.  One vendor has been actively trying to sell into our accounts for about five years now and most of the time, they don’t have a product that fits customers' needs and aren't really considered.   Is this counted in win-rate calculations?  Many times, a vendor responds to an RFP as an invited vendor, but doesn't make the "short" list.  Is this counted in the win-rate calculations?   When multiple vendors are in the running, meaning it’s not a head-to-head competition, how is the win rate calculated? 

Finally, here’s a third suggestion for journalists.  During this past year, one competitor has suggested in its press releases, and journalists picked up as a fact, that it has won some major customers away from Teradata.  In each case, however, those public announcements did not tell the whole story.  The customers in fact continue to use Teradata and even expand their Teradata systems.  So, ask the vendor to tell you exactly what they’ve won and ask the customer if they’re continuing with Teradata. 

We respect all of our competitors – large and small – but many of their marketing claims just don't prove out.  We welcome the competition from competitors as they've actually generated new RFP's for which Teradata, as the industry leader, is invited to participate.  Consequently, the competitors have actually helped to expand opportunities.  With our new Teradata 2500 data warehouse appliance for entry-level data warehousing, we're even more competitive in the market place.   

It is indeed an exciting time to be in this market…an interesting market to cover…just be sure that you get all of the story