Teradata in talks with retail giants for data warehousing

Teradata, a division of NCR, a leading player in the enterprise data warehousing, analytic applications and data warehousing services, is in talks with Indian retail giants for data warehousing.

Teradata offers enterprise data warehousing, financial management, CRM, supply chain management and other products, apart from vertical specific products like logistics for retail and telecom companies.

The company has developed 'Affinity Analysis', a Teradata product for retail companies that can predict the probability of a consumer buying certain product when they approach it.

"Our system has secured a mathematical model for every product to decide the probability of being sold. This helps the person at the counter to ensure better sales by suggesting products that consumers are likely to buy. This product is used extensively in the worldwide market but we are yet to enter the Indian retail market. We are in talks with some top retail companies and hope to be offering such data warehousing products and services in the next six months," said Dennis Samuels, vice president "" South East Asia & India for Teradata.

Explaining the product, Samuels said that depending on what the consumers buy during each visit, Teradata uses complex statistical and mathematical models to judge how the consumer will behave the next time he visits the store.

"We can observe a certain buying pattern and ensure repetitive buying pattern for certain products and make suggestions to organised retailers on logistics, supply chain management, shelf management and consumer behaviour," added Samuels.

Samuels is hopeful that the Indian market will be quick to adopt products given that 50 per cent of retailing is about branding and creating customer value while the rest is about infrastructure, distribution network and logistics.

Initially, Teradata will focus on big retail players in tier-I cities and later might shift to other smaller cities. Samuels reasoned that as a policy, the company globally pursues top companies only. Globally, Teradata's clients feature biggies like Wal Mart, AT&T, Ford Motors and FedEx among other names.

According to Samuels, 10 per cent share of the global data warehousing market worth $19 billion is held by Teradata.