Seattle — Teradata Canada believes providing companies with a single view of corporate data has helped it steal business from rivals whose data warehousing approach is based on silos of information.
One example of a “”takeaway,”” the company told attendees here at this year’s annual Teradata Partners
User Group conference, was the Royal Bank of Canada. In the past, the bank was “”dominated by IBM,”” a formidable foe whose servers Teradata Canada continues to consolidate, Rick Makos, president of Mississauga, Ont.-based Teradata Canada, said at the Teradata Partners User Group Conference.
Teradata Canada is talking to another IBM shop that’s realized its “”infrastructure costs are through the roof, and they need to actually look at a different approach,”” Makos said, declining to identify the firm.
What’s more, Makos said, his organization also managed to convince Bell Canada and Loblaw Companies Ltd. to jump over from Oracle.
“”What you find is you may get a small footprint or a small implementation. And then you actually start to knock off these other database instances,”” Makos said.
“”That’s the key thing. With Teradata, on a single platform, a single database, we can start to grow it and then retire all these other systems. In many cases, we may co-exist with multiple data warehouses or data mart environments, and then slowly over time we’ll actually build business cases to consolidate them into the centralized Teradata environment.””
IBM offers only partial view of data
The IBM strategy, for instance, uses a distributed model providing a partial view of customers’ business in one data mart, but mandates “”joining data”” from other systems, a cumbersome approach that doesn’t allow people to act quickly, Makos said.
Former IBM data warehousing client, RBC, has used Teradata’s database V2R5.0 to run an analytical process called Value Analyzer for several years.
It provides the bank with insights into how it needs to better serve customers, said Art D’Silva, manager, enterprise information functions and strategies at RBC in Toronto.
“”The Tier 1 customers might be ones that are more profitable in terms of the nature and type of interaction that we have with them. They use certain types of products more often, and therefore they’re candidates for preferred treatment, if you will,”” or more focus from a retention standpoint, D’Silva said.
“”We may have another class of customers that are not as profitable. And it could be because of what we offer them in terms of services aren’t necessarily tailored to what their requirements might be. “”
RBC worked with Teradata to develop the software, which is now available to sectors such as insurance, retail and investment, he said.
As for RBC’s interest in new products announced by Teradata earlier in the conference, D’Silva said the bank will definitely upgrade to new releases of products when it’s ready.
At the moment, however, he’s not familiar enough with Warehouse 8.0 to zero in on which specific features RBC finds most appealing.