Company leaders have long struggled to align and synchronize operational practices with strategic goals in a way that empowers them to effectively manage business performance. Matching corporate goals with line managers' realities is at best an arduous, inaccurate process and at worst a tactical impossibility.

Now, by integrating their technologies, Teradata and Oracle have partnered to offer organizations the unparalleled ability to track complex progress metrics and make swift and precise business decisions. With a platform of integrated enterprise data and performance management and business intelligence (BI) tools, this partnership improves companies' abilities to make smart decisions.

For example, say the goal of a financial planning and analysis manager is to help double a product's revenue in five years while also improving margins by 10%. When the manager devises a plan, no matter how diligent the effort, if unreliable data is gleaned from system silos and ad hoc conversations with executives or employees, the results are likely to be vague, unwieldy and ultimately unsuccessful.

The integrated technologies available from Teradata and Oracle will give that manager the tools needed to create a detailed, easily updated plan that ties back to higher-level strategic targets and aligns financial and operational processes.

From a desktop dashboard, the manager can monitor the plan's progress through linked financial and operational data. Key performance drivers and insight into performance variances will enable the realignment of the functions and operations most relevant to the product's performance.

With these six components of the joint solution, companies can create performance-driven cultures built around data-based decision making:

1	Enterprise data warehouse (EDW) from Teradata works seamlessly with Oracle tools to give employees at all levels near real-time access to data from disparate systems.
2	Oracle Essbase, an online analytical processing server, provides a rapid application-development environment that enables users to quickly model complex business scenarios such as revenue forecasts and margin projections.
3	Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE) is an integrated suite of BI tools that is highly optimized to work with the Teradata Database to provide the foundation for building true enterprise BI solutions. Employees at all levels can monitor performance against goals using features such as interactive dashboards and advanced reporting and publishing tools.
4	Oracle BI Applications are pre-built BI solutions that deliver role-based intelligence to everyone in an organization, enabling better decisions, actions and business processes.
5	Hyperion Performance Management Applications, a modular suite of integrated applications, are designed to drive profitable growth throughout the financial management cycle of goal-setting, modeling, planning, monitoring, analysis and reporting.
6	Oracle Data Integrator is a powerful extract, load and transform (ELT) technology that improves performance and reduces data integration costs—even across heterogeneous systems.

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A clear market need
The joint solution offers myriad ways for companies to better execute their strategies. Most importantly, they can capture near real-time data from financial and operational systems. Then, using dashboard alerts and customized reporting, they can communicate their progress to the entire organization.

The integrated Teradata/Oracle technology appeals across industries to companies that need to design data-driven strategic plans and detailed operational plans that, together, will help unite all levels of the organizations in support of their goals. By leveraging drill-down BI capabilities to understand underlying operational performance drivers—the what and why of variances—employees will gain real-time performance insight. This empowers organizations to proactively take corrective action and communicate strategic updates that help guide day-to-day decisions and optimize enterprise performance.

Offerings through the Teradata/Oracle partnership will help eliminate the guesswork hindering most attempts to link corporate strategy to operational execution. T

PRODUCTS Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System, including Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, Oracle BI Applications, Hyperion Performance Management Applications, Oracle Essbase, Oracle Data Integrator ATTRIBUTES Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System is a portfolio of technology and applications that provides the industry's first integrated, end-to-end enterprise performance management system. BENEFITS With Oracle's industry-leading business intelligence (BI) and enterprise performance management solutions, organizations gain better insight, make better decisions and drive better results that are delivered more quickly. COMPANY Oracle, the world's largest enterprise software company, was founded in 1977 and is headquartered in Redwood Shores, Calif., USA.

Lori Janies writes about business and technology for various publications.

Teradata Magazine-September 2008