BI Giants Zoom in on Location Intelligence

In the increasingly noisy and convoluted world of databases and data warehousing, even stalwart Teradata, like “frenemy” Oracle have to make big announcements to stand out from the crowd.  As of late, the best way to get noticed has been to plug the word “Hadoop” into a product release—but other buzzwords are also finding their way into big name announcements.

Location intelligence is one such term that has seen a major uptick in coverage as of late. This refers the use of GIS and location data to make connections between products, customers, concepts and just about anything else that can be analyzed according to spatial orientation.

Teradata and Oracle, via their “strategic alliance” landed on the radar today with their news that they would be stepping up their curb appeal to business intelligence users, in part due to their emphasis on GIS integration. In a statement released this morning, the companies said that through their alliance, they will be able to offer more advanced features, including the highly coveted ability to move geospatial capabilities into existing BI environments.

According to Teradata, this will be integrated into the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition’s (OBIEE) existing mapping capabilities and will help companies build location intelligence into their strategies. The use of GIS data across industry verticals has been an important movement, and while Oracle and Teradata refined their solution, a number of companies have sprung up to fill the location intelligence gap. However, what they might be lacking is the full integration that existing Oracle and Teradata customers have.

According to Teradata, the geospatial addition “allows for the storage, processing, and retrieval of spatial coordinate data that enables calculation of key measurements (e.g. distance) that reveal competitive insights (such as how far customers are willing to travel to redeem discounts, the optimal location of a new branch or distribution center, or the most profitable location for a new cell tower relative to high-value customers).”

Additionally, it’s worth noting that Teradata made a secondary announcement today. The Ohio-based company said it was was sliding query banding into OBIEE. They claim that this will provide full OBIEE integration with Teradata’s management functions to make it easier to track and “manage user activity and user profiles, and to prioritize system access per user while improving workload management across user communications.”

The company explains that currently, workload management is an increasingly complicated matter for BI system administrators. They say that most BI tools and applications use pooling mechanisms that hide users’ identity, obstructing administrators’ ability to incorporate user and application identity into decisions involving prioritization of system resources across different user communities, troubleshooting, accounting and chargebacks.

According to Teradata “Query Banding with OBIEE allows identification of the origin of requests submitted through middle-tier applications and enables workload management strategies based not just on the application involved, but the source (user) of each request.”

Related Stories

Partnership Targets BI Scalability

SAS Previews High Performance Analytics Features

New Path for SAP: In Memory Computing, Predictive Analysis Converge