Business Objects And Teradata Jointly Deliver Optimized, End-To-End BI Solutions

Your organization faces unprecedented growth in the amount of data it receives. Across the company, users are scrambling to access the right data at the right time.

In this rapidly evolving technology landscape, how can your organization scale—without compromising information access? And how do your executives get a single view of the business to make effective decisions?

The Business Objects and Teradata joint solution provides the answers. This unique partnership delivers optimized end-to-end business intelligence (BI) solutions to Business Objects and Teradata customers.

"Business intelligence, along with Teradata's enterprise data warehouse, enables customers to get a single version of the truth in order to make better business decisions. This joint solution ensures that the right data reaches the right business users, in a timely manner," says Janet Wood, group vice president of global alliances and OEM at Business Objects.

With its latest release, BusinessObjects XI, Business Objects fully leverages Teradata's strength for speed and access to detailed enterprise data—across technology platforms including reporting, extract, transform, and load (ETL), and performance management.

The company also takes it a step further with the Teradata Advisory Group (TAG). TAG comprises joint customers from Business Objects and Teradata and is a groundbreaking forum that's currently an industry best practice on how to capture, integrate, and deploy product enhancements and optimizations in record time.

Founded in 2003, the group meets quarterly to discuss concerns and exchange ideas. Its suggestions create better synergy between Business Objects and the Teradata Warehouse. Currently, TAG demonstrates how the partnership's greatest asset, its customers, can dramatically impact the solution's overall integration roadmap. TAG drives customer requirements for new Teradata-specific optimizations directly to Business Objects and contributes to successful global BI deployments.

With its BusinessObjects XI platform, Business Objects is now highly optimized for Teradata. The joint solution includes the ability to cancel bad queries, use aggregate awareness and create full outer joins. It also provides increased support for derived tables as well as Teradata SQL expressions and functions. This is a huge advantage for the company's more than 300 joint customers. Using the combined solution, customers can now see immediate performance gains and run their reports, taking advantage of the derived tables feature.

"BusinessObjects XI on Teradata provides a compelling solution for companies looking to standardize their BI deployments," says Stephen Brobst, CTO of Teradata. "Teradata has worked with Business Objects to tightly integrate and optimize BusinessObjects XI on Teradata's warehouse, enabling customers worldwide to more easily extend the value of BI to a larger number of users across the enterprise."

The fully optimized solution is now flying high in the aerospace industry. A case in point is the materials management challenge faced by the aerospace and Air Force defense contractors. The contractors found it extremely difficult to monitor aircraft lifecycles and manage the complex materials supply chain associated with them.

But thanks to the joint solution from BearingPoint, Business Objects and Teradata—which now incorporates the Air Force's own data structures and metrics—aerospace and defense contractors can now manage and track aircraft materials more efficiently. Thus, Teradata and Business Objects constantly seek creative ways to bring solutions to market.

The Aerospace and Defense Decision Support System (A&D DSS)—a collaborative solution from BearingPoint, Teradata and Business Objects—now allows contractors to analyze the right data and guarantee the necessary resources to maintain mission-ready aircraft. A&D DSS provides the same Web-enabled BI tools, data schema and metrics that the Air Force uses. Contractors can combine data from Air Force knowledge services (AFKS) with data from their own legacy systems and information from suppliers. This helps create informative and meaningful views that business managers can use to make knowledgeable business decisions.

The A&D DSS thus enables defense organizations to improve the mission readiness of aircrafts, with detailed reports and dashboards, trend analysis of the supply chain and details of top equipment issues.

"The Aerospace & Defense Decision Support System goes well beyond standard reporting," says Greg Lorden, vice president of North American sales at Business Objects. "It allows business users to create the ad hoc queries they need—with minimal training—to make intelligent business decisions. This guided analysis provides end users with a simplified and guided experience that allows them to answer critical business questions as they arise."

The A&D DSS system is a ground breaking example of the benefits in store for Business Objects and Teradata joint customers. With the system in place, defense organizations can now improve tracking to increase the frequency of supplier negotiations.

"The Business Objects and Teradata partnership brings a best-of-breed solution to defense contractors," says Gary Ahrens, vice president of BearingPoint's air force and aerospace defense sector. "The ability for business managers to easily conduct trend analysis using data from widely disparate sources is tremendously powerful. And the return on investment our customers are seeing is well in excess of the cost of the BI system."