The 6.0 launch comes with new branding, Relationship Manager, over 100 new features focused on cross-functional and business unit analytics, and a revamped set of Web browser-based interfaces build around personas.
The company worked with Cooper, a Californian interactive design and consultancy firm, to develop role-based interfaces that provide personalized views of data and campaign analyses and metrics.
Also included in Relationship Manager 6 is the Teradata Application Platform (TAP) which allows customers to tweak the pre-built modules of the product and build in specialized functionality.
The product is expected to ship in the fourth quarter of 2005.
Sam Gragg, director of customer management solutions at Teradata, bills Relationship Manager 6 as an advanced campaign management tool.
We decided to change the name to reflect the core capabilities of the product…to forge closer relationships between companies and their customers, he said.
Mr Gragg added: Our customers have driven the new features included in Relationship Manager 6 that enable consistent multi-step channel dialogs across different [customer] touch-points and extends the benefits of campaign analysis to non-analytic users.
Relationship Manager works exclusively with Teradata’s active data warehousing database infrastructure.
Teradata’s move to deepen its analytic CRM solution is interesting since the company has also announced it is expanding its alliance with Siebel, which is being acquired by Oracle Corp. The two companies have been partners since April 2004. The expanded alliance tightens up integration between the Siebel Business Analytics suite (at the logical and physical data model layers) and the core Teradata Warehouse platform.
Building off its acquisition of nQuire Software Inc in 2001, Siebel has subsequently set up its own Business Analytics Division and is pushing its own Marketing Analytics application which is arguably competitive to Relationship Manager on some functionality. Meanwhile Oracle competes directly with Teradata on the database and data warehousing fronts.
At face value, this alliance has all the hallmarks of an uneasy love-hate triangle. Teradata executives however don’t believe the relationship will change as a result of Oracle’s predatory ambitions, but acknowledge that it will require a delicate balancing act.
We wouldn’t have spent time renewing our relationship if we weren’t confident of the relationship moving forward, said Bob Fair, Teradata’s chief marketing officer.
Mr Fair pointed out that Siebel is a diamond sponsor at Teradata’s Partner event in Orlando, where both announcements were made recently.
Also, Larry Ellison has also gone on public record saying that Oracle will support heterogeneous databases as part of its future [applications] strategy, Mr Fair added.
Teradata officials also point out that the company has faced a similar challenge in keeping its partnership alive with data integration firm Ascential Software, which is now owned by IBM. IBM is of course another direct database competitor for Teradata.
Paul Rodwick, vice president of alliances at Siebel Business Analytics, agrees and said there is minimal overlap between what Siebel and Teradata each bring to the table.
Our relationship is helping Siebel customers to expand their data warehousing warehousing footprint while Teradata customers benefit from a broader suite of applications covering sales, contact center, supply chain, financial and workforce analytics, he said.
Mr Rodwick said that since both companies have been partners for almost two years, they have ironed out any potential conflicts over sales.
He did not comment on what might happen once Siebel is under Oracle’s wing.
Mr Ellison’s claims to open up Oracle’s applications stack to third-party database infrastructures is perhaps more believable today than say two years ago. With a keen eye towards taking market share away from bitter rival SAP AG, Oracle is now starting to re-position itself from a pure database company towards an applications company (as witnessed by its recent acquisitions of PeopleSoft, Retek and logistics firm G-Log). If this is the case Oracle won’t necessarily be looking to force customers onto its own database platform.
Teradata also announced several other partnerships at the Partners event: Business Objects SA (business intelligence for retail), Lavastorm (telco analytics), Sunopsis SA (data integration) Subex Systems (financial analysis for telcos), and Attensity Corp (text analytics).
Teradata’s technical and business alliances will face increasing scrutiny if it decides to broaden its solutions focus, especially if more of its key application partners merge with rival database infrastructure players.
