Synergy is a word often used—and misused—in the business world. Like many words with genuine, specific applications, it can be frequently employed as jargon. I'm sure you can recall occasions when you heard folks make vague, meaningless references to synergy, when in reality the discussion was only about a merger or consolidation that might not have any truly synergistic effects at all.

It's too bad the word tends to be devalued this way, because the concept is as simple as it is powerful. That's especially true in an enterprise setting. Deployed intelligently within an enterprise, synergy and synergistic processes allow companies to integrate various departmental positions and, ultimately, impact the whole business through increased agility. This nimbleness can enable businesses to conquer competitive challenges, leading to profitable growth.

Achieving business synergy can be risky because it has the potential to expose, for better or for worse, the entire organization's ability to focus on your corporate mission. But the good news is that synergy can create efficiency that ultimately brings your company's analytics to a broader constituency. You no longer need to depend on relatively slow processes driven by statisticians and other back-office personnel.

Harnessing this power, successful businesses bring pertinent data and intelligent real-time decisions directly to the people who need them. This closes the loop that circles from data to intelligence to decisions to action.

At Teradata, our commitment to this vision of synergy is reinforced by our latest release, Teradata Warehouse 8.2, which continues to build on our established capabilities to infuse real-time intelligence into front-line operations and strategic planning.

We've focused our technology stack on supporting the mixed workloads that are driven by integrating analytics with operational applications, and we are doing it with efficient use of your existing infrastructure. Our newest offering makes closing the loop easier from the standpoint of integration.

Through products and mindset, the keys to enable synergy in your organization are to:

	Make integrated decisions that will have an impact on your business's mission
	Distribute knowledge to close the loop

The idea of absolute, seamless synergy might seem utopian to some, but the tools and the know-how exist. The challenge is finding and installing the pieces that will make the abstract concepts of synergy pay off in tangible terms for your enterprise. T

Scott Gnau is vice president and general manager of research and development at Teradata.

Photograph by James Aranovsky

Teradata Magazine-March 2007