Stephen A. Brobst, chief technology officer of US-based Teradata Corporation, talks to BW Businessworld about the role that analytics can play for businesses. Excerpts...
Q: What is the significance of Teradata’s work in the international market? A: Teradata works with more than 35 per cent of the Global Fortune 500 across multiple industries to build data-driven businesses. Everyday, our customers use the power of data to affect billions of lives. From the world leader in construction equipment to leading distributors like Walmart, Unilever, McCain Foods, Coca-Cola, Sainsbury, Metro Group, Sony and Netflix, among others, use our solutions.
Q: How is your India business shaping up? A: Teradata has been in India for over 12 years, employing over 1,700 who work across R&D, consulting and professional services, and sales field operations. Teradata counts Volvo, Hertz, P&G, Unilever, Vodafone, Lufthansa, Standard Chartered and Siemens as some of its global clients that have a significant presence in India. We are working with 60 per cent of telcos that operate in India. We see telcos, retail, e-commerce, manufacturing, automotive and government business as our biggest growth drivers.
Q: How is analytics relevant in the Indian context?A: Today, more data means more details, but not necessarily more insight. We are focusing on Indian organisations because despite being data rich, they are still insight poor. We are helping them to realise and uncover how data can become a big opportunity to gain more insight. New insight can drive better decisions that give them a competitive edge or allow for new avenues of business growth.
Q: What is the level of interest in analytics from the government and security agencies? A: Information is a highly sought after commodity for our security agencies. Teradata offers an analytics framework to do the heavy lifting associated with cyber security threats in realtime and helps to identify and isolate suspicious activity, exposure or disclosure of private data, Website defacement, extraction of intellectual property and other forms of cyber espionage. We are seeing some traction with police intelligence agencies trying to explore the above technologies.
Q: How can you help Indian companies?A: Teradata can contribute significantly with its ‘Unified Data Architecture’ approach across multiple industries in India. We can help companies in tracking and understanding customers’ interaction on social media platforms.
ashish.sinha@businessworld.in
(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 25-01-2016)
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Ashish Sinha is an experienced business journalist who has covered FMCG, auto, infrastructure, tourism, telecom among several other beats. Ashish has keen interest in the regulatory scenario impacting different sectors. He writes on aviation, railways, post and telegraph, infrastructure, defence, media & entertainment, among a wide variety of other subjects.
