Since the 1980s data warehousing veteran Teradata has focused on perfecting the process of capturing data and moving it to a data warehouse. Back in 1984, it built the world's first parallel data warehouses and data marts for strategic decision makers. In 1987 it evangelized and adopted “a single version of the truth”—a way for companies to have a single view of the business. Teradata is now moving closer to the “truth” by coupling data warehousing with BI.

Says Girish Shivani, Principal Solutions Consultant, Teradata India, “There is strategic intelligence that is driven by a few people in the organization, where you need a lot of historical data to do trending, make annual plans etc. The other is operational intelligence where you empower frontline staff (who interact with customers) to take decisions as close to real time as possible.”

Teradata is offering Active Enterprise Intelligence, a bundle of hardware, software, database and consulting services for this unification. It says marrying strategic intelligence with operational intelligence gives enterprises the capability to align decisions and allows frontline staff to make decisions. Says Sanjeev Agrawal, Head - Sales & National Manager - Alliances, Teradata India, “Traditionally, data warehousing has been restricted to the strategic user group. Businesses now need to empower frontline staff who take decisions on a daily basis—they need to be in line with the long-term decisions taken by strategic thinkers.”

Active Enterprise Intelligence is a modular solution. Agrawal says its unique feature is to move transaction data from the OLTP system to the data warehouse in almost real time and to make it available to operational staff for decision making. This is made possible through Active Load Components. Each job in the database is engaged in an ongoing struggle for more resources for its own work, often competing against other diverse activities. In most databases, these me-first conflicts result in short, resource-light queries falling victim to the heavier jobs. Those batch fraud-detection reports and long-running market share analysis queries take ownership of the database and all it has to give. Active Workload Management decides how database resources are divided between specific business needs.

Once the data is in the warehouse it needs to be accessed by the operational staff using Active Access. The overall goal is to provide many decisions per minute to operational frontline users. This is typically done with tactical queries in a 1-5 second response time goal. The objective is to have small amounts of detailed data and summarized data delivered to the operational user in less than 1-5 seconds. Active Access can be the result of a simple inquiry where the operational user is merely taking advantage of the clean, reliable data in the ADW. Or it can be the result of an Active Event which ends as an alert or graphical display to notify the user that some event has occurred which needs attention. Operational decisions are also based on customer profiles and behavior. Active Events lets a person define business rules to monitor the data in the warehouse and raises alerts based on these rules. Based on these events one will discover opportunities to cross sell and upsell. Finally, reliability and availability are the core of being able to support an active data warehouse. Built upon a fault-tolerant hardware platform, a Teradata installation is designed to withstand component failures with no service interruption.