Teradata Business Analytics Innovation Center

Bill Franks was up next to talk about the joint SAS, Teradata, Elder Research Business Analytics Innovation Center. The purpose of this center is to help customers develop game changing analytic solutions not just adopt analytics. The center brings together best SAS and Teradata folks to help customers with analytics while also bringing third parties like Elder Research into this arrangement. Elder Research, for those of you who don’t know them, are an excellent specialty analytics/data mining company (I have blogged about them before).

The center is designed to help customers at every level – from analytically unsophisticated folks who need examples and suggestions, to those with some analytic experience who need advice on scaling and broadening adoption, to those driving to real analytic competition who need a brainstorming partner to help them find cutting edge opportunities. The center has:

• Team of people from SAS, Teradata and Elder Research
• Large Teradata install in Cary, NC along with all the SAS software
• Library of projects, methods and techniques from cumulative experience
• A community for analytic professionals – clearly some customers won’t want to share their analytic experiences with their competitors but there are still learnings to share

Core offerings from the center:

• Analytic Discovery – a briefing and brainstorming session around analytics and how they can be used
• Analytic Improvement – experimentation with new data sources, new algorithms or techniques
• Analytic Transformation – develop new techniques and approaches to push the envelope with a client

This is part of a general focus on making more effort to develop business opportunity partnerships, not just technical/product partnerships. The center fits outside the SAS/Teradata product partnership that the companies are developing and will use those jointly developed products while also pushing the roadmap, developing new capabilities.

Of course this is still brand new and is virtual so not much in the way of proof points nor any hard numbers of staff assigned.