Teradata Data Lab Offers Extreme Flexibility for New Analytics Development

SAN DIEGO, Dec. 12, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading analytic data solutions company, today introduced Teradata Data Lab software, a self-service, on-demand workshop within a Teradata warehouse that enables businesses to rapidly explore and test new ideas and data to innovate, identify trends, or immediately react to business conditions.  

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"The Teradata Data Lab empowers business users to start building new analytics in less than five minutes," said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs, Teradata. "This agility pays off for business users looking to achieve competitive advantage, while benefiting IT organizations with the lowest total cost of ownership, embedded security and privacy controls, and ease of maintenance. In addition, our customers now have the ability to easily deploy the newly-developed analytics and applications."

"The Teradata Data Lab is another critical innovation for Bouygues Telecom. It provides each business unit with a private 'sandbox' for creating experimental designs, one-time business intelligence (BI) requests, and ad hoc queries," said Marielle Vo-Van Liger, director of Business Intelligence and Customer Knowledge, Bouygues Telecom. "Once established, the BI analytic is funneled back into the enterprise data warehouse where it can be shared. IT monitors the sandbox activity to ensure satisfactory performance of strategic queries, efficient data loading, and economical reporting processes."

"Self-service analytic workspaces, or sandboxes, offer a valuable and important alternative to uncontrolled data marts for building analytic prototypes and models, and experimenting with data," said Colin White, president of BI Research. "The Teradata Data Lab introduces a valuable and powerful tool for deploying and governing these sandboxes."        

The Teradata Data Lab, a self-service analytic environment, provides business analysts and IT professionals with on-demand database space and system resources for short-term projects such as ad hoc analysis, proof-of-concept, application evaluation, or quality assurance testing. The lab enables quick assimilation of new data into a separate portion of the data warehouse, where it can be analyzed along with insight-rich data already in the warehouse, to quickly prove success or fail fast, and move on.

"Self-service business intelligence is a valuable step forward, but it often pits business users, who want unfettered access to data in order to drive innovation through new analytics, against IT managers who are responsible for the environment's security, performance, and quality," said Claudia Imhoff, president, Intelligent Solutions, Inc. "Teradata Data Labs gives both communities all that they need, business users have open access to valuable assets and IT managers are able to monitor and exert oversight."

Without the Teradata Data Lab, business users struggle to integrate untested data with their business data because of data warehouse governance policies and other safeguards. When business users make requests to their IT department for temporary data loads to the warehouse the wait time may be weeks or even months. As a result, users often deploy an expensive "skunk works" data mart. The data mart requires data replication on external servers, as well as, additional software, and places a burden on company resources to support the systems. These obstacles make it virtually impossible for users to test and explore new 'what if' scenarios that can lead to breakthrough business discoveries.

The Teradata Data Lab provides customers with this capability, which drives innovation and business advancement, as these examples demonstrate:

Media Company - The marketing director for a major media company has just launched a campaign to promote the bundling of phone, television, and Internet services. He needs to analyze marketing campaign results, so he can do an analysis to understand the impact on corporate revenue. However, the IT group has a two-month backlog of requests and can't meet the director's need to get the results within hours in order to plan his next move. Instead, the director uses the Teradata Data Lab to create a workspace within the production warehouse and immediately begins his analysis and realignment of the campaign to meet quarterly revenue expectations.

Retail Chain- To accelerate holiday sales volume from its retail outlets, a business analyst wants to use location data to identify strategic locations to open temporary holiday outlets. The analyst needs to test various scenarios in order to determine the optimum locations, but he can't test this without building a prototype. The Teradata Data Lab allows the analyst to build a prototype of the geospatial application and combine the company's existing data with new location data. Within hours, the proof of concept is performed within the Teradata data warehouse yields the most advantageous locations to open temporary holiday outlets and increase revenues.

Financial Institution - A financial institution wants to expand its small business loan portfolio and customer base by acquiring another institution. To make a timely decision, a due diligence review must be performed to include analysis of thousands of accounts and many product lines offered in multiple states. The acquiring institution's business analysts used the Teradata Data Lab to quickly combine relevant data from both institutions. Although the potential take-over target looked attractive, the analysts learned that it wouldn't be a profitable acquisition, because the customers were not in the appropriate market segment and offered limited growth potential.

"Business user accessibility to the data and analytic tools must keep pace with the demands of our business," said Renee DePalo, manager, Information Management and Business Insights, Pharmaceutical Segment, Cardinal Health. "The data lab within our Teradata data warehouse is accelerating our ability to turn big data into meaningful, valuable business insights for our internal customers."

The Teradata Data Lab simplifies implementation, governance, and management, and alerts the database administrators when it approaches expiration dates, or space limitations. It is subject to workload management criteria, which ensures that rogue or complex queries don't impact warehouse production users. From design to implementation, Teradata Professional Services help guide optimal results every step of the way.

Relevant Links

1. Teradata Magazine, Freedom to Explore, Gary Ryback
   http://www.teradatamagazine.com/v11n04/Tech2Tech/Freedom-to-Explore/
2. Customer Success: Bouygues Telecom: The Intelligence Telecommunications Company http://www.teradata.com/case-studies/Bouygues-Telecom-the-Intelligent-Telecommunications-Company/
3. Hunt for Customer Insight – Cabelas Agile Analytics
   http://www.teradatamagazine.com/v10n03/Tech2Tech/Agile-Analytics/
4. BSI episode: Fragrant Sleeper Hit
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnYkQ9AE4G4&feature=youtube

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