The Business Intelligence Blog

A blogpost on BI Vendors by Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise -

In the “Advanced Analytics” camp, IDC’s stats show that Microsoft, SPSS and SAS were the fastest-growing vendors among the top five with 20.0%, 17.8% and 15.2% sales increases, respectively (see chart at left). Visual Numerics grew 9.3% and Teradata treaded water with 3.0% growth. Mind you, SAS and SPSS are in a league of their own with $440 million and $205 million in revenue, respectively, while all the others were in the Single-A, sub-$50 million ballpark.

SAS has plenty to crow about in IDC’s stats, so it has once again purchased rights to distribute an excerpt of the report as a free download. Unfortunately, this year’s excerpt only covers the top-five vendors in each category (last year’s excerpt covered 21 BI tools vendors and 13 analytics vendors). If you’re prepared to pay $3,500, you can purchase the complete “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2007 Vendor Shares” report, which details sales among the top-15 vendors in BI in 2007 — a list that adds MicroStrategy, Information Builders, Actuate, QlikTech, Panorama Software, IBM (without Cognos), and TIBCO to the companies mentioned above.

By Anshu Shrivastava of TMCNet, an article on the new Teradata Warehouse Miner.

The technology of data mining discovers patterns in customer, financial and operational data that can provide valuable business insights, according to Teradata.

The newest enhancements to Teradata Warehouse Miner are supported by the recently announced SAS (News - Alert) Scoring Accelerator for Teradata. Keith Collins, CTO at SAS, said that Teradata’s new functionality, and the recently released SAS Scoring Accelerator, are integrated and complementary solutions.

Teradata’s officials pointed out that the an initial benchmark of the SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata demonstrated the ability to process the number of records “45 times faster” than the traditional scoring method.

Moreover, the SAS Scoring Accelerator for Teradata also eliminates the need for manual translation of the SAS scoring code into SQL, or structured query language.

Here’s a follow-up to the previously posted series, Breakthroughs in Analytics, from Tech News World.

In the latest update, Ned Madden talks about the various tools and vendors in the Analytics domain. Read more.

Today’s software packages are much more focused on the actual application of analytical approaches to specific types of decision problems and specific types of industries, according to Anthony Milano, GMI’s VP of professional services.

“In the old days, tools were typically very general purpose in nature,” Milano told TechNewsWorld. “Now, oftentimes, tools are much more focused on helping users solve specific types of problems in business verticals and industries.”

Vendors are even adapting their core analytical engines to specific needs by creating a packaged solution that includes a version of the engine, analytic models, processes, methodologies, add-ons and extensions that allow the product to solve a very specific need, Milano said.

“Importantly, this type of solution minimizes the amount of time required to solve the problem and makes it easier for the client to get the job done without requiring a deep topic expert,” he added. “In effect, these packaged solutions embed the expertise in the solution.”

Milano stressed the importance of analytics solutions that are provided under the rental model from an application service provider (ASP) as Software as a Service (SaaS).

“These software delivery models have proved to be very cost-effective and efficient for customers, particularly when all the costs of owning and installing your own software are understood,” he said.

Teradata Corporation has introduced a new family of platforms from entry-level to active enterprise data warehouses that addresses many customer needs (especially of Indian and other similar markets). Powered by the Teradata 12.0 database engine, the family includes Teradata 550 SMP (symmetric multiprocessing), Teradata 2500, and Teradata 5550.

Teradata 550 SMP is a departmental data warehouse, designed to meet customers’ need for a smaller, less expensive system. It is simple to set up and can use the Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system or Windows. In addition, customers can license and run the Teradata 12 database on their choice of Intel-based platforms, starting at $40,000. Teradata Express Edition, a free developer version of Teradata 12, is available to work on Windows servers and laptops for development, testing and learning.

From EFY News article.

Press Release - Protegrity and Teradata today announce unmatched data warehouse encryption performance

Protegrity Corporation, the leading provider of Data Security Management solutions, and Teradata, the global leader in Enterprise Data Warehousing today announced new cryptography performance of over 6 million decryptions and over 9 million encryptions per second, enabling customers to maximize data protection while minimizing impact on business operations.

“Our research shows that businesses worry that data protection may impact application performance. These test results show that the partnership between Teradata and Protegrity delivers proven enterprise solutions that help customers protect data and achieve regulatory compliance with industry-leading system performance,” said Gordon Rapkin, president and chief executive officer of Protegrity.

The Protegrity Defiance® Defiance DPS uses Teradata User Defined Functions (UDFs) to embed encryption/decryption functionality in the database. Teradata’s high performance UDF implementation and parallel architecture provides highly efficient execution, and then scales that performance linearly as the system grows in size.

“High performance data protection enables our customers to confidently meet their privacy and compliance obligations,” said Randy Lea, vice president, Teradata products and services. “The efficiency of this data protection solution frees our customers from the technical challenges to focus on the value of business analytics. This data, rich with insight, provides a better understanding of consumers.”

The test included the Defiance® Data Protection System utilizing industry standard strong Advanced Encryption Standard and Teradata 12 on a six-node (12 Intel® Xeon® processors) Teradata 5550 Platform.

Since 2004, Protegrity and Teradata have collaborated on enterprise-level data encryption and management. In June 2005, the companies announced a global partnership to deliver database security for Teradata customers.

ABOUT TERADATA
Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is the world’s largest company solely focused on raising intelligence through data warehousing and enterprise analytics. Teradata is in more than 60 countries and on the Web at www.teradata.com.

ABOUT PROTEGRITY
Protegrity delivers centralized data security management solutions that protect sensitive information from acquisition to deletion across the enterprise. Protegrity’s customers maintain complete protection over their data and business by employing software and solutions specifically designed to encrypt data, safeguard web applications, and manage and report on security policy.

The company’s singular focus is on developing solutions that protect data. Protegrity employees are security technology specialists with deep expertise in encryption, key management, web application firewalls and security policy in distributed environments. Maximize security with minimal business impact with Protegrity’s Defiance® Suite, the high performance, transparent solution optimized for the dynamic enterprise.

To learn more, visit www.protegrity.com or call 203.326.7200

Ohio-based Teradata’s first-quarter net income fell to $42 million, or 23 cents per share, compared with net income of $43 million, or 24 cents per share, a year earlier.

….

The U.S. company’s shares fell about 5 percent after it released its first-quarter results, then moved to trade 5 percent higher after Chief Executive Mike Koehler said that stronger overseas growth should offset a weaker than expected performance in the United States.

“We are seeing extremely strong activity in all the international geographies,” Koehler said on a conference call with analysts.

“When we take a look at the activity we have at this moment and the activity longer term … we are clearly going to be up from what we originally expected coming into the year,” he said.

More at Reuters.

From Fox Business-

Teradata Corporation, the leader in enterprise data warehousing, announced today that it was selected by Caterpillar, the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines and industrial gas turbines, to supply licensed software applications and enterprise data warehouse services to support Caterpillar’s global rollout of SAP, a program supporting business information management.

Caterpillar purchased Teradata’s market-leading analytical software running on a LINUX-based three-node 5500H server, plus an additional hot standby node and six terabytes of storage capacity.

“This new strategic partnership offers an exciting future for our mutual customers because they will benefit from the combined power of the leading BI and analytics provider and the leader in enterprise data warehousing,” said Mike Koehler, president and chief executive officer of Teradata. “Together, SAS and Teradata offer companies the ability to more effectively leverage their data as a strategic corporate asset for better, faster decision making throughout the enterprise. We clearly see the customer demand to optimize the processing and use of data throughout the enterprise.”

Customers are already communicating the value they see in the partnership and how the integration will help them achieve competitive advantages. For example:

“As a result of integrating SAS and Teradata technologies, we have reduced overall processing time to run our forecasting model from 36 hours to one hour and 15 minutes,” said Thomas Tileston, vice president of Business Decision Support for Warner Home Video.

“We are always seeking ways to increase our clinical analytics capabilities, which improve the delivery of healthcare for our clients and their membership,” said Mark Halloran, chief information officer, Medco Health Solutions Inc. “The ability to achieve a higher level of integration with both SAS and our Teradata platforms will provide both increased operational efficiencies and enhanced information analytics, which position Medco to better serve the needs of our clients.”

In addition, SAS and Teradata have created a Center of Excellence (COE). This dedicated joint team of solution architects and technical consultants will help customers achieve increased performance and capabilities from their current and future SAS and Teradata IT infrastructure. The two companies will also establish a joint executive-level customer advisory group for product feedback, future direction and determination of subsequent integration priorities.

Read more from the press release.

Active Data Warehousing isn’t really a buzzword. Its been in the industry for a while. Thanks to Teradata who made this buzzword popular. They called it @ctive Data Warehousing and branded the spelling.

The reason to bring back this term is because -

Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), the global leader in enterprise data warehousing, announced today that Highmark Inc., the largest health insurer in Pennsylvania and one of the largest in the U.S., continues to expand its Teradata Warehouse and its multiple-terabyte information assets. The large-scale analytics expansion increases the company’s production environment and supports the shift to active data warehousing (ADW).

For newbies, here’s more about ACtive Data Warehousing from DM Review of April 2004(yep, its 4 years old enough) -

Active data warehousing is a process, not a specific technology. Teradata has popularized the term “active data warehousing,” tried to brand the spelling “@ctive data warehousing” and deserves credit for providing examples of some big, successful active data warehouses. However, if a more generic term is preferred, then “closed-loop processing” is a useful synonym, though it only partially captures the concept. Your data warehouse (DW) is active if

It represents a single, canonical state of the business (version of the truth). Too often, companies put data into a data warehouse and also store it in a plethora of other data stores. If a data warehouse must be match-merged with dependent data marts to provide needed information, then it is a potentially useful data store, but it is not active.

It supports a mixed workload. The workload of an active data warehouse will typically consist of tactical inquires executing concurrently with complex business intelligence (BI) queries and trickle updates. If the DW is used only for operational queries such as customer transactions or product inventory, it is not active.

Operational processing is driven by the DW. Active data warehouses do not exist in a vacuum. They exist in a processing loop.
The “outbound” activity goes from the data warehouse to the operational system by means of automated system mechanisms including triggers, special purpose programming interfaces, a message broker and an extract, transform and load (ETL) tool - though the ETL tool is not often used for outbound activities. If the data warehouse doesn’t deliver information automatically to operational systems, then it is not active. Manual intervention gets the job done, but the DW is not active.

It represents a closed-loop process. In particular, the data warehouse is used to optimize processing in the upstream operational or transactional system. The operational systems feed the data warehouse which, in turn, feeds back to the operational system to optimize the relevant transactional processing. The interfaces go in both directions. The data warehouse provides operational intelligence and, as active, can properly be described as driving operational processing.

Teradata is ranked in the top 10 list of business intelligence providers in the Annual Consumer Goods Technology Reader’s Choice. The ranking is based on customer experience as reported by consumer goods executives to an independent third party. An IDC study called “Taming Information Chaos,” issued in November, puts business decision-making throughout the world at a critical crossroads, with business intelligence technology now an important component in differentiating between leading and average companies.

Teradata was also listed in Food Logistics magazine’s FL100, an annual listing of the Top 100 technology suppliers to the food industry. The FL100 lists technology and solution providers that transform the food supply chain, including food, beverage and consumer packaged goods manufacturers, distributors, grocery wholesalers and third-party logistics providers.

More here.