INDUSTRY

Teradata customers achieve greater interoperability with Microsoft's business intelligence solutions.: Microsoft and Teradata, a division of NCR Corp., today announced they are working together to optimize interoperability between Microsoft business intelligence solutions and the Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse to help information workers gain access to, analyze and report on critical data more quickly, and help streamline the delivery of business intelligence applications. As part of this effort, Microsoft and Teradata are collaborating to enhance interoperability between the Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse and Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, targeting availability of the technologies for the end of the first quarter of 2007. In addition, interoperability collaboration efforts with Teradata will include SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services; SQL Server 2005 Integration Services; and the 2007 Microsoft Office system including Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007. The worldwide relationship includes plans for joint sales and marketing activities across multiple industries, beginning with the retail sector. "The combination of these powerful Microsoft and Teradata technologies will enable our joint customers to make better, faster decisions by infusing real-time intelligence into frontline operations and long-range strategic planning," said Randy Lea, vice president, Teradata products and services. "Enterprise intelligence provides companies with a competitive advantage because they have a single view of their business built on the foundation of an enterprise data warehouse." "Our goal is to enable business intelligence and performance management across the enterprise," said Tom Casey, general manager for SQL Server at Microsoft. "SQL Server 2005 is an integral part of Microsoft's end-to-end business intelligence platform, which enables businesses to perform these types of mission-critical tasks. The seamless integration of the Microsoft BI solution and Teradata technologies provides significant value to our joint customers." Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services is a leading OLAP server on the market and provides a fundamental mechanism for surfacing data to other Microsoft analytic and reporting tools. Microsoft applications and tools can access the data in this analytic engine to bring data from the Teradata Warehouse to information workers in the tools they use every day for high- speed, interactive reporting and analysis, as well as more traditional informational reporting. Teradata Warehouse technology is utilized by many of the world's most successful enterprises to provide high-performance and reliable data warehousing. Teradata customers routinely leverage hundreds of terabytes of data to analyze business trends and decide how best to run their businesses. "Microsoft and Teradata are two of our strategic industry partners, and we are thrilled with the increased collaboration between the companies' technologies," said Bill Noakes, executive vice president and chief information officer at Meijer Inc. "To get the most out of our data, we need to be able to analyze every bit of it as quickly as possible. The improved, real-time intersection between the Microsoft and Teradata environments will help us improve this process and enable us to provide a solution that will better serve our customers." In addition to planned software and joint go-to-market activities, Teradata will be working closely with Microsoft's worldwide Technology Centers to enable joint customers to engage in joint proof-of-concept activities and learn about best practices.