Teradata Adds Master Data Management Capabilities To Its Lineup

Teradata is adding master data and product information management capabilities to its data warehouse product line that will strengthen the links between data warehouses and operational IT systems.

Master data management defines and classifies information that's shared across a company, such as lists of customers or suppliers, product information, and corporate organizational data, providing a reference point for constantly changing transactional data. A company that sells a product under different brand names around the world, for example, would use a master data management system to help consolidate and analyze sales data about that product.

Master data management is becoming increasingly important as businesses try to integrate disparate data sources scattered throughout their organizations. It's also playing a role in companies' efforts to consolidate financial data to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II.

Data warehouse systems have traditionally been used to analyze data pulled from operational systems on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. But given today's need for faster decision making, more data warehouses are being designed to analyze data on a near-real-time basis, a practice Teradata calls "active data warehousing." The new master data and product information management products are another step toward linking data warehouses and operational data sources, says Satish Krishnaswamy, Teradata's VP of MDM solutions. They can be used to support both analytical and operational tasks in customer data integration, demand and supply management, and risk mitigation, he says.

Teradata Master Data Management and Teradata Product Information Management, based on technology Teradata has licensed from i2, are available now as add-on products to the Teradata data warehouse system. They're priced according to configuration, ranging from around $500,000 to over $1 million. The vendor also has plans to link them with other Teradata software, including its data quality management tools and financial and supply chain analysis applications, as well as build it into a packaged customer data integration application.