Progressive Enterprises’ Alan Hesketh says he is optimistic about SAP’s recently announced partnership with Teradata, but wants more information about it before he can judge if the alliance will be of particular value to the supermarket giant.
Hesketh, who is IT general manager for Progressive, which is a customer of both vendors, says he can see some significant benefits for his company, “but it’s something time will tell. The initial announcement I saw had little re the benefits to us as a company that will be delivered.”
SAP, the ERP software leader, and Teradata, a data warehousing specialist, claim the partnership will bring new capability to customers in various industries.
The lynchpin of the deal is SAP’s NetWeaver integration and applications platform, through which Teradata will access data held in SAP applications.
As to the possibility of a conflict between the alliance and SAP’s own Business Warehouse data integration product, SAP New Zealand country manager Ian Black says the main thrust behind the partnership is that his company recognises Teradata’s large customer base.
“We want to make it easy for customers to get value from the product. If someone has invested in Teradata, we don’t want to say ‘dump that, get Business Warehouse’.
For customers who have made that investment, we want to make the interface straightforward.”
As for those SAP customers who haven’t yet bought a data warehouse product, “it’s a question of what’s the right product for them. We’re not saying we won’t be competing for business in that customer base.”
Speaking to online news site The Register about the alliance, Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst said “none of our competitors keep data at the basket level of detail.
“Because their systems weren’t designed to cope with as much data as our hardware-software combination, most of our competitors don’t even try to keep the original data to drill down to. They just keep summaries.”