'Benchmarking is a need for all verticals'

----Tim Vokes, executive director for

Benchmark Center and Active Data Warehouse Center for Excellence, Teradata

What are Teradata's offerings and plans in India?



Teradata, a division of NCR, offers enterprise analytic technologies. Teradata

provides full portfolio of solutions in India; it is a database and a hardware
solution that does decision support for finance, retail, telcos, etc. We are
working on the next two releases of Teradata database. The company plans to

increase this number significantly in the coming six-nine months. 

What kind of opportunities does India provide for the

company?



In India the opportunities are immense. Right now, there are no data warehouses
as to speak in India. So the first phase consists of setting up data warehouses.

Indian banks are one of the largest in the world, and their goal puts them into

top 1% of the largest commercial data warehouse that would exist. If they are

successful in the first phase, they will be 50 times larger in the next three

years, than when they started. They want to know who is doing something this

large in banking and is successful; we can produce such references. Secondly,

many of these are government-sponsored industries have an open, fair, and

measurable method of choosing providers. And this is where benchmarking comes

in.

How does benchmarking help companies?



There are very few of these large companies in India who have a decision support
system. But due to regulatory compulsion and competition, the need for decision

support from any vendor is now what everybody is focusing on. How do I choose a

vendor, who can do this best for me and minimize this risk of failure? This is

where benchmarking comes in.

I feel that companies gain so much when they take a customer's

data and put it on a data warehouse solution and run questions that are

meaningful for the business. With benchmarking, technical people will get a feel

of what their life would be like managing the hardware and the software, how

does it behave, etc. Users can see the types of business questions they can

analyze; and executives can evaluate the technical and business aspects and also

how much it costs. These things come together to take a more meaningful

decision. 

Which other verticals are you targeting?



All. The businesses may be different, but there are some pieces that are exactly
the same such as accounts, general ledger, etc. According to me, this is the

year of retail, banking, finance, and telecom.

-Pragati Simlote 



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