SAP and Teradata Partner to Drive Analytics

Teradata, a division of NCR, and SAP AG have announced a partnership to deliver analytical solutions to specific vertical industries with high data-volume requirements, namely telecommunications, financial services, pharmaceuticals, and aerospace/defense. These vertically focused firms will be able to integrate analytics capabilities into their existing SAP, ERP, and CRM applications, according to SAP. The companies claim the integrated solutions will provide customers with a more integrated view of their business by delivering industry-specific analytical solutions that are highly scalable and offer a rapid return on investment. As part of the agreement, Teradata also becomes an SAP Global Technology Partner. Both companies say they are also contributing engineering and technical resources and assets, as well as consulting capabilities. "We believe that strategic relationships between enterprise resource-planning vendors and enterprise data-warehouse vendors can be quite valuable to their joint customers," says Barry Wilderman, senior vice president, technology research services at META Group. "As each vendor is likely to provide enterprise data stores, as well as business intelligence tools, any initiative that allows natural joins across the data using the customer's analytic tools of choice will enhance corporate decision-making." According to Bill McDermott, CEO and president, SAP America, the relationship is important for SAP because it will help the company satisfy its customers' growing data-volume needs. Through tightly integrated interoperability between Teradata's enterprise data-warehouse products and SAP NetWeaver, joint customers will have access to Teradata's scalable enterprise analytic capabilities that will be fully integrated with SAP NetWeaver's business intelligence capabilities. According to Michael Koehler, senior vice president and head of Teradata, the agreement will result in improved integration that mutual customers have been requesting, and should allow them to make better decisions from an integrated view of customers and operations.