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Enterprise software giant SAP signed an interesting agreement with Teradata this week that should go a long ways towards giving companies the ability to conduct complex analytical queries throughout their operations.
The companies announced that they had signed an agreement to provide the SAP NetWeaver business warehouse directly on the Teradata database. SAP and Teradata have partnered for several years, but this agreement brings the companies a step closer to providing customers with a fully integrated offering.
"This essentially takes the partnership to a higher level and formalizes the relationship between the two companies," says Keith Henry, vice president of manufacturing solutions for Teradata.
A number of companies already use both Teradata and SAP products, but there is also a wide spread use of various databases and business intelligence tools used in conjunction with those installations. The goal, says Henry is to get closer to a truly integrated enterprise data warehouse (EDW) so companies can analyze operations across databases and across platforms.
"Instead of pulling data out of SAP (to run analytical queries), we want to be able to say to customers, you can just run (Teradata) EDW on top of SAP and do all of your analytics."
As part of the agreement, the companies are setting up a joint innovation lab at SAP's operations in Palo Alto, Calif. The "hands-on" lab will provide a place for customers to collaborate with SAP and Teradata on real-world simulations and to vet investment decisions in advance.
Henry says the joint offering will be particularly appealing to customers in the manufacturing arena, which has long been plagued by information in silos. Consumer goods manufacturers, for example, have found it challenging to take data held internally in SAP, and combine it with supplier data, shipper data, and end-customer data, to perform such analytical queries as generating a demand plan.
SAP is estimated to count as much as 85% of global manufacturers in its customer base and the two companies share such clients as Hershey, Caterpillar, Ford, Goodyear, Limited Brands and Anheuser-Busch.
Teradata also has a strong relationship with business intelligence vendor SAS, which is considered a rival to Business Objects - a company SAP acquired last year. While there may be some overlap, Henry notes many companies use both BI tools, depending on the type of analytics being conducted.
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