ALEXANDRIA: Teradata Corporation, the world's largest data warehousing company, held the first stop of its annual international CTO Road Show in Alexandria on June 4-5. A series of workshops on “business and technology trends for data warehousing” was presented to Teradata clients and prospective clients in Egypt. “Advanced compression techniques” were the focus of this year's stop in Alexandria, Teradata Corporation's Chief Technology Officer, Stephen Brobst, told Daily News Egypt. According to Brobst, Teradata shared with its Egyptian clientele its latest compression capabilities that will “increase compression capacity ten-fold,” enabling “one terabyte of data to be compressed down to 50 gigs, or 20x compression.” With mankind producing “more data in the last three years than in the previous 40,000 years of world history,” Brobst explained, and an even larger set of data expected to be produced in the coming three years, the employment of the latest and most efficient data compression tools is critical for companies to fully leverage this “big data” and drive efficiency and growth. However, it is important not to confuse “big data with lots of data,” Brobst warned. Instead, “big data” that is useful to companies depends less on the sheer amount of data and more on its “complexity and diversity.” These new types of data sources that companies can capture, warehouse, and analyze, can include anything from social media sites, blogs, CCTV footage, and even conversations between customers and customer service agents. The end product of the warehousing and analysis of this data is business intelligence that can help companies succeed in highly competitive marketplaces. According to Martin Willcox, director of platform and solutions marketing for Africa, Middle East and Asia, Teradata is introducing new tools that employ “sophisticated algorithms to extract such unstructured [complex] data” and store it in “scalable enterprise data warehouses.” This data, for example, can help companies identify customers who they are about to lose in a timely manner, enabling companies to spring into action and retain their business, Willcox explained. The abundance and power of this sort of data, which is moving from being a “byproduct [of a company's] operations to a raw material,” is a manifestation of what Willcox calls a second revolution in information technology, one in which “we will be able to [identify] customer interactions that lead to [specific] outcomes,” in other words; how customers arrive at their decisions to purchase a specific item. Teradata's position in this cutting-edge data warehousing and business intelligence industry, recognized globally as the “fastest growing fields in IT,” has not only enabled the company to survive the recent global financial crisis, but actually thrive in it, according to Khaled Hamouda, country manager for Teradata Egypt. On top of weathering the global economic downturn, Teradata Egypt has also managed to post significant growth despite the revolution earlier this year. While they will not meet their set goal of 30 percent growth for 2011, the company is still on pace for an impressive 15 percent growth, Hamouda told DNE. The reason for this growth is that, according to Willcox, the capabilities Terdata provide become all the more critical for companies during economic recessions if they hope to succeed. “The middle of a global economic downturn is a really bad time not to know who your most profitable customers are, [and] which processes of your organization are adding costs or adding value.” As a result, organizational focus on “information management and analytics actually intensely increases during a recession.” Evidencing this notion, Willcox emphasized that Teradata's “strongest growth last year, certainly from a European perspective, came from the financial services industry,” which was the “industry most effected by the global economic downturn.” Customer perspectives One of the reasons for Teradata's success appears to be that it is not merely vendor to companies, but an integrated partner that enables them to develop and leverage business intelligence as a core driver behind corporate strategy. Emirati telecomm company Etisalat, for example, has worked with Teradata since entering the Egyptian market in 2007. “We weren't choosing a database engine, we were choosing a partner for a business intelligence journey,” Mohamed Abdel Rahim Ismail, Etisalat's senior manager in Egypt for enterprise information management said. “Etisalat's enterprise information management system,” powered by Teradata, helped the company “achieve its strategic objectives in this really competitive marketplace,” Ismail told DNE. The telecomm industry is one of Teradata's main target markets in Egypt, Hamouda, the country manager explained, for it is one of the most competitive marketplaces in which data and business intelligence can make the difference between success and failure. Teradata also works with Etisalat's main competitors in Egypt, Mobinil and Vodafone, who were also in attendance at the workshops. This, however, doesn't worry Ismail. “We don't have any issue with Teradata working with competitors,” he explained, adding that he believes his company is more capable than its competitors in maximizing the “value it receives through technology to satisfy business requirements and needs.” Teradata also works closely with government institutions to help them capitalize on the power of big data. Prior to 2004, Egypt had no consistent or centralized platform to measure the country's import and export statistics, Dr. Samir El-Gammal, chief information officer and advisor at the ministry of trade and industry, told DNE. To address this problem the ministry partnered with Teradata and built a data collection, warehousing, and management system to accurately measure the country's exact trade figures in real time. This system, which has brought the ministry “peace of mind” according to El-Gammal, has proven itself capable of supporting high level decision making, such as during the crisis brought on during the Egyptian revolution in February, in which the country faced potential critical import deficiencies. While Teradata works with government across the world, including work in the “classified” arena, the company did stress that it maintains strict guidelines on the type of work it will engage in for governments. According to Willcox, while all types of technologies could be put towards “good and benign” uses by governments, such as assisting them in “meeting the needs” of their citizenry, or towards negative uses, Teradata only gets involved in “projects [they] are comfortable with from an ethical standpoint.” In addition, Willcox stressed, Teradata was “named one of the world's most ethical companies” this year. Empowering consumers While it may seem scary from a consumer standpoint to think about companies collecting, storing, and analyzing vast amount of data on their behavior, the trend will be to actually share this data with the consumer to help them make better decisions, Brobst, Teradata's CTO predicted. According to Brobst, a company's “maturity” in their data warehousing and business intelligence capabilities will be measured by “how much information they share with non-employees.” For example, Brobst cited a project by a US power company to install smart meters on the homes of their customers in order to measure exactly how much electricity each household consumes and when. Doing so, Brobst continued, will allow the company to develop alternative pricing models that “will offer customers ways to save electrical costs.” By sharing this information, consumers will be able to see how much they can save if they were to conduct power-consuming activities during off-peak hours. The application of this data sharing is not only applicable to the power industry, but also to banking and financial services, retailing, and many others. In the end, companies will be able to allow their “consumers to make decisions more efficiently,” Brobst concluded.
