SEATTLE — Teradata Canada said Tuesday that providing companies with a single, consistent view of corporate data has helped it steal business from rivals whose data warehousing approach is based on silos of information.
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example of a “”takeaway”” is the Royal Bank of Canada, which in the past 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 in fact talking to one IBM shop which has 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.
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 explained.
“”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 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.””
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 for four or five years used Teradata’s database V2R5.0 (part of Teradata Warehouse version 7.0) to run an analytical process called Value Analyzer . 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 customer s 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, explained D’Silva.
“”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 like 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 said he’s not familiar enough with Warehouse 8.0 to zero in on which specific features RBC finds most appealing.
RBC, Loblaws, Hudson’s Bay Co. and Bell Canada are just a handful of the 25 accounts Teradata Canada has in its data warehousing business. It’s part of a market valued at US$1-billion in Canada and that’s made up of about 100 to 110 customers that Teradata is actively targeting, Makos said. The sector is expanding by 10 per cent each year.
Makos, who assumed the role of president three years ago, said Teradata Canada grew by 250 per cent within 18 months. He said he cannot provide actual revenues because the firm is in the middle of its blackout period as it nears its quarter-end.
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