Becoming Data Smart
Retailers today face the daunting task of having to cut costs and squeeze out new revenue and margin opportunities while also having to maintain a certain level of customer service. In order to better service their business needs, retailers are analyzing customer preferences and sales trends to make more informed buying decisions.
Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics today provide retailers with the ability to analyze, predict and act quickly on big decisions related to market conditions.
Business Intelligence and advanced analytics provide retailers with insight into supply and demand patterns so they are able to quickly respond to out-of-stock or overstock situations. Retailers also are able to view customer data by segment, so they can better understand who their customer is and identify which are the most valuable to their business.
BI and analytics provide insight into how to optimize promotions and offers so that retailers can ensure the highest levels of redemption and response. They also provide the information that is necessary to tailor localized assortments for different markets and customer segments. Another huge benefit is the organization also is able to operate more efficiently.
Teradata has recently made several announcements in this area. The technology provider recently has announced that several retailers including Home Depot, CVS, and Macy's have plans to implement Teradata's active enterprise data warehouse and other products that can ultimately create huge benefits for their businesses.
- Home Depot: The big box retailer is implementing an active enterprise data warehouse
- CVS Caremark: The pharmacy's services division of CVS continues
- to expand its Teradata environment to get better insight to run their businesses and save costs
- Saks Fifth Avenue: The department store selected Teradata to help improve its current forecast accuracy at the store level.
- Macy's: Marketing power users will use a Teradata system for advanced market basket analytics.
- Shop Direct Home Shop-ping Limited: The UK's largest online and home shopping retailer is consolidating data marts into an active enterprise data warehouse.
Teradata also has added a major smartphone and computer company as the latest member of its 'Petabyte Club.' Teradata launched its elite 'Petabyte Power Players Club in October 2008 with eBay and Walmart signing on as original members. Customers that qualify must run data warehouses larger than a petabyte. eBay, which runs 5 petabytes of data and Walmart, which runs 2.5 peta bytes, qualified. eBay, which started in 2002 with a single 14TB system, today processes 50PB of information a day.
Enterprise data warehousing will continue to be Teradata's primary focus throughout the remainder of the year. Enterprise data warehousing requires high concurrency of users, complex queries and analytics, ad hoc queries, active loads and real-time access.
Teradata also recently announced Teradata 13 which has the ability to include and analyze geospatial data inside the database, which allows companies to incorporate more precise location data and enhance business insight.
Tens-of-thousands of variables can be analyzed directly in the database. The loading of data at high speed has been made possible by using specialized tables to support businesses that accumulate massive data volumes.
Additionally, the Teradata 13 query optimizer interprets a query and determines the most efficient way for the database to process it.
Teradata also recently introduced virtual storage. Virtual storage provides automatic placement of data on disk based on data temperature or usage and provides immediate throughput for users. It supports mix drive types such as one terabyte back drives or the new solid state drives.