The news that leading companies are competing on the quality of their analytics won't surprise any regular readers of this magazine. They already know Teradata's view on the competitive impact of performance analytics based on a single, integrated view of the business. It's the only way to manage a complex enterprise in a competitive environment.

Today, every business is under relentless pressure to deliver better performance quarter after quarter. We can no longer succeed by doing one or two things right most of the time; we must do thousands of things right every time. So we're trying to squeeze more value out of every business process. We're looking for smaller, incremental improvements—and lots of them.

To find those hidden improvement opportunities, we need to mobilize all of the intelligence and experience at our command. We must improve decision making at every level by pushing data and analytics to front-line decision makers and by building a culture of continuous measurement and re-evaluation. To compete on analytics, management needs to institutionalize analytical thinking throughout the organization.

But first we need that integrated view of the data. In that regard, an organization that already has a Teradata environment—truly integrated, built-in third normal form—has a huge head start on the competition. And Teradata research and development is constantly extending that advantage with new features to sharpen our users' competitive edge. Consider three current examples:

	Improved performance for operational applications. Extending analytics across the enterprise and competing on analytics inevitably require much more data and much shorter load intervals. That puts an enormous strain on the infrastructure, so Teradata 12.0 includes significant performance improvements to support large active workloads from across the environment—operational applications, e-commerce Web sites, employee portals, mobile and point-of-sale devices.
	Integrating SAS analytics. Through our strategic partnership with SAS, we're integrating key SAS data mining tools and analytical applications with the Teradata solution and data models to enable in-database data mining, decrease data movement and improve analytical performance.
	More diverse data types. The integration of new data types into the warehouse to support analysis across a broader set of data, especially unstructured text and voice data, is another development initiative. Between 80% and 90% of the data in most organizations is unstructured text, so today's data volumes are only the tip of the iceberg. And that brings us right back to the importance of performance.

Better analytical tools that incorporate more data and extend to more users are the core requirements for competing on analytics, and Teradata is delivering them. This is evident not only among our customers in the Asia Pacific and Japanese markets but throughout the world. Because no competitive innovation remains unique for long, the Teradata solution is evolving continuously to better enable real-time operational business intelligence (BI) at true enterprise scale.

Make no mistake, the future of global competition is data-driven decision making at every level. And so, as more and more organizations leverage analytics for competitive advantage, those using a Teradata solution will, indeed, find themselves at the top of their game. T

Teradata Magazine-June 2008