Commentary:

An intelligent partnership

13 November 2007

Microsoft and Teradata together give users better analysing and reporting tools, writes Sam Tawfik of Teradata.

Microsoft and Teradata together are bringing business intelligence (BI) solutions for enterprise customers. The interoperability between Microsoft BI solutions and Teradata streamlines delivery of business intelligence applications so information workers across the enterprise quickly access, analyse, and take action on critical information.

Now information traditionally available to a limited employee group is available to front-line employees anywhere at anytime. Let's say ABC Appliances rolls out a major advertising campaign for a high-definition television. The featured television is made by Pure Vision, and there is a guarantee of 10 televisions per store. Four days before the campaign, the marketing application detects insufficient stock in a major-market store and alerts the store manager, Lisa. The alert arrives to Lisa's personal digital assistant (PDA), she verifies the information and e-mails Patricio, ABC's televisions buyer who reads it on his Smartphone. Amy, Pure Vision's distribution manager, receives the alert from Patricio via a Web browser and logs on to the ABC partner Web site to investigate the potential profitability impact, television delivery status, and possible corrective actions, and resolves the problem.

This ability to detect a problem before it has significant consequence and correct it quickly is a priority for Teradata customers. Teradata partners with the largest software providers of business intelligence (BI) tools to extend the power of the Teradata Warehouse. Microsoft delivers the critical information in the Teradata Warehouse to all employees, enabling the Microsoft People Ready enterprise.

Teradata solutions are used by successful organisations worldwide to gain detailed knowledge of their operations, and enable information workers to access and analyse critical data and take action. Microsoft Office Excel is inarguably the most widely used business intelligence tool in the industry. Microsoft and Teradata together provide access to the Teradata Warehouse via Excel and also streamline the delivery of BI applications.

Technical solution

Microsoft's applications report and present BI results analysed with Teradata's online analytical processing (OLAP) technology. OLAP technology, often used foundationally for developing and deploying BI solutions, provides multi-dimensional, aggregated levels of business data. Business intelligence solutions offer rich slicing and dicing graphical tools and user-friendly pivot tables, but typically the aggregated relational data must be extracted and stored. This creates inherent latency, scalability and performance limitations. The Teradata-Microsoft solution leverages the Teradata Warehouse as the relational OLAP (ROLAP) engine and the Microsoft BI tools for front-end user analytics.

Teradata supports the OLAP solutions by eliminating hefty data transfers and data duplication, thus reducing hardware costs and enabling drill-thru to the relational data while leveraging Teradata Warehouse scalability and predictable response time. The key technology for the ROLAP optimisation is the Teradata aggregate join index (AJI), which specifies SUM or COUNTS aggregate operations across one or more tables. AJIs require no user or administrator maintenance and are used automatically by the Teradata optimiser to improve the build of the initial OLAP content, and in accessing and navigating the relational data.

Microsoft will deliver BI solutions to all front-line operational employees with the rich BI stack that includes: ? SQL Server 2005 database technologies - Integration Services, Reporting Services, and Analysis Services provide data integration, enterprise reporting and real-time data analysis, respectively. ? PerformancePoint Technologies - ProClarity delivers interactive drill-down and analysis of multi-dimensional data, and Business Scorecard Manager handles interactive dashboarding and alerting. ? Office System 2007 - including Microsoft Excel client and server.

To ensure high-performance interaction, the two companies developed a Teradata-specific 'cartridge' (or connector) to map metadata from Teradata and improve the SQL generation to Teradata from Analysis Services. The Teradata .NET Data Provider (32 bit and 64 bit) is the advocated interface when connecting to SQL server Analysis Services.

Further integrations between the Microsoft environment and Teradata are planned, including SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, and BizTalk application integration.

Solution implementation

ABC Appliances and its suppliers work as a team through a Teradata-Microsoft collaborated solution. Each supply chain partner can detect and monitor critical business events, and access the supporting data stored in the Teradata Warehouse via pivot tables in Excel for further analysis. Pure Vision uses radio frequency identification (RFID) chips to monitor television movement through the supply chain, and uses Teradata as the active repository for RFID data. By using a supply chain intelligence application to provide cross-functional business visibility, Pure Vision knows the predicted business impact of a late pallet, considering logistics, sales, point of sale and forecasts.

Alerts, such as committed promotion date, pallets shipped or projected to be late, and potential lost sales and revenue, are distributed via the partner portal and are accessed via Excel. Pure Vision can also drill through to the detailed relational data and use the operational information to take immediate action.

As you can see, by using its Microsoft BI tools together with Teradata, ABC Appliances can extend to front-line employees the ability to take immediate corrective actions.

Teradata (NYSE: TDC) is the world's largest company focused on raising intelligence through data warehousing and enterprise analytics. Teradata is located in more than 40 countries and on the Web at www.teradata.com

Sam Tawfik has over 20 years of IT experience and is currently a technical product marketing manager with Teradata Corporation. Sam has extensive experience with data warehousing, enterprise application integration, application design, and methodology-based enterprise solution implementation.