Developing new partnerships continues to be an increasingly important step in our long-term strategy to deliver end-to-end enterprise solutions as we begin a new era with Teradata as an independent company. Teradata's partnership approach has a unique goal of optimizing the return on investment (ROI) in our customers' enterprise data warehouses (EDWs).

We work with an elite cadre of best-in-class partners—companies large and small—that routinely help customers make the most of their EDW platforms and their data assets. Working with partners gives our customers choices on the best way to use their data to drive rapid, strategic decisions.

We focus on several types of partners, including independent software vendors (ISVs), consultants and systems integrators (SIs). Because they understand, build and integrate within Teradata environments, these partners create a virtual Teradata ecosystem.

This ecosystem of partners, combined with the power of Teradata, expands our customers' decision-making capabilities, creating smarter, faster and more effective organizations that can effectively apply strategic and operational intelligence. Our mutual customers can then re-engineer their business processes and redesign their technology infrastructures, resulting in improved operations, cost savings, increased profits and enhanced satisfaction. Moreover, these partnerships support the ongoing innovation from which our customers gain and maintain competitive advantage.

Partners play a key role in developing deep industry analytics. They bring a critical mass of expertise to new areas—such as unstructured text, Basel II, solvency and radio frequency identification (RFID). National security-related data retention issues are another new technology area where the expertise of our partners is a vital part of our capability to deliver cutting-edge solutions for customers.

Industry solution providers such as Agilent are helping telecommunications companies better understand how network performance affects marketing programs, customer service and operations. Agilent and Teradata together are enabling these customers to increase revenue and reduce churn by finding new ways to use the power of business intelligence (BI) and real-time analytics to understand the customer experience.

Partners are also integral to the process of defining business requirements for our software. They model business needs so customers can enable functional design and transformation.

With our new SAS partnership, the focus is on creating the capability to run and optimize key aspects of their solutions and analytic processes within the Teradata data warehouse engine. By leveraging SAS analytical functions to utilize and exploit the distributed parallel processing inside the Teradata EDW architecture, organizations are able to capitalize on higher performance run times, reduced data movement and more accurate, faster analytical development and processing.

Partnerships help our customers better manage data as a strategic corporate asset, address key issues such as data acquisition and integration, and improve both data quality and security.

For the new Teradata, creating and supporting key partnerships is critical. Together, Teradata and its partners help customers make necessary changes in their business functions while maintaining a foundation for future growth.

It's a simple equation: Teradata + Partners + Customers = A winning strategy for all. T

Teradata Magazine-December 2007