Teradata Joins Unified Computing Crowd with New DW Framework

The Unified LDM is a new portfolio of products and services for incorporating data warehousing analytics into an IT system.

Data warehouser Teradata officially joined the unified computing trend Oct. 25 on the first day of its annual partner conference in San Diego.

Teradata, which is said to own about two-thirds of the enterprise data warehousing market, unveiled its Unified Logical Data Model Framework and Product Portfolio (Teradata Unified LDM), which enables enterprises to build and manage data warehouses-and, of course, add analysis and reporting on all the data-across their entire supply chain.

The Unified LDM is a new portfolio of products and services for incorporating data warehousing analytics into an IT system. It is built on 10 years of product development expertise and implementations at hundreds of customer sites, Teradata Vice President of Product and Services Marketing Randy Lea told eWEEK.

Teradata sees the Unified LDM as a blueprint for collecting and storing data that supports business units across an enterprise. The idea is to enable customers to model and integrate internal and external business processes and data, be able to report on them, and to use the answers whenever needed, Lea said.

"We're seeing more of our customers move from [straight] transactions to interactions," Lea told eWEEK.

"For example, that basically means that when I deal with an airline and I buy a ticket to go to Chicago, it's 'Did I have a layover?' It's not just $318 for the ticket, it's 'Was I delayed? Did I have bad service?' It's all those things you see in retail [business]."

All that peripheral information to a transaction plays importantly into a customer experience and must be accounted for in business analytics in order for a company to get a true picture of how well-or badly-it is executing its business processes.

The Teradata Unified LDM consists of a set of standards and conventions governing the logical data modeling process, Lea said.

Key features of the LDM, according to Lea, include:

• High performance, in-database processing
• In-database, high-performance environment to run analytics; this optimizes the analytic process by eliminating data movement while leveraging the parallel processing of the Teradata database engine
• Application development, OLAP optimization, agile analytics, geospatial, temporal, unstructured analytics, data exploration and advanced analytics
• Ability to integrate multiple subject areas into a single environment for analytics
• Process complex analytics against "big data"
• Ability to extend analytics with customized in-database methods
• Tools include SAS, IBM SPSS Modeler, KXEN, R, Hadoop, Attensity, Clarabridge, Information Builders WebFocus, Esri, CoreLogic, Apos, Tableau, Microstrategy, SAP Business Objects, Oracle BI, Cognos and Microsoft.

Lea said the Unified LDM will become available at the end of November, and all 10 of the industry LDM product releases under the unified framework will be deployed by the end of December 2010.