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Tableau Software and Teradata join forces to provide graphical BI for everyone.
by Lori Janies
Many solutions aim to help companies capture and process the vast amounts of data they generate and receive every day. This information has typically been distributed to and used by IT experts and data analysts exclusively. But a partnership between Teradata and business intelligence (BI) company Tableau Software enables business users who have no IT expertise to visualize and analyze the hows and whys of data to make better decisions, faster and easier.
For instance, a product manager at a national grocery chain oversees frozen pizza procurement and sales. In the past, this manager received paper or online reports from the company’s first-generation BI system, which offered day-to-day, week-to-week and minute-to-minute information about items such as sales performance, inventory, price changes and discounts. This information simply detailed what happened but provided no capacity to learn more. Consequently, the manager knew frozen pizza sales fell 20% at one store location the first week in January, but he had to speculate about why the drop occurred and what to do about it.
After implementing Tableau Software optimized for the company’s data warehouse from Teradata, the manager can not only learn about the sales drop but also use Tableau Software’s simple drag-and-drop interface to gather additional relevant, real-time information from the enterprise data warehouse.
The manager simply points and clicks on various sections of a dashboard to get instant answers to follow-up questions that previous reports couldn’t offer: Did this situation happen last year at this time? Did the sales drop for a particular brand of pizza? Did it happen with any other product in that store? How many times has a 20% change occurred in the past three years? Did other store locations suffer a similar drop? In seconds, the manager’s computer screen displays a series of easy-to-understand maps, charts and graphs that visually answer those questions.
With access to this previously unattainable BI data, the manager can pinpoint sales trends and their underlying causes, then take proactive steps to predict, plan for or prevent future sales fluctuations.
How it works
The Teradata/Tableau solution includes the following components:
- Teradata Database. This secure, centralized warehouse houses granular data from all areas of the organization.
- Standalone Tableau Desktop Professional application. Interfacing directly with the data warehouse, Tableau Desktop Professional enables users to get real-time information without extracting or moving data. They can also conduct visual Q&A sessions by simply pointing and clicking. The application comes preloaded with worldwide map images to help visualize geographic information, and it provides the ability to employ thousands of public domain maps. Other application features enable users to:
- Answer a series of questions using interactive visual analysis
- Look at unlimited factors simultaneously
- Add one factor at a time to understand its effects
- Anaznalyze time series by drilling from years to months to seconds
- Create dashboards based on live data
Unlike other BI tools that require intense IT interaction or system architecture analysis to implement, a specially designed “data connector” allows users to install Tableau Desktop Professional, “point” it to the Teradata Database and begin interfacing with the data—all within a few minutes. And because the data isn’t moved or changed, there is no risk to it or its integrity.
- Tableau Server. This optional component enables users to publish and share data and visualizations with a standard Internet browser. They can also publish interactive analytics or dashboards and embed Tableau views into other Web applications. Tableau Server’s secure data filters ensure that users will see only the data they are authorized to access.
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A perfect union
As pioneers in the next generation of BI tools and data warehousing, Tableau Software and Teradata have formed what many see as an ideal marriage.
One of the founders of Tableau, Pat Hanrahan, also was a creator of computer animation giant Pixar. Tableau officials are attempting to create a paradigm shift around BI access and visualization in much the same way Pixar spurred a fundamental change in digital animation techniques and film-creation technology.
Tableau enables people across an enterprise to access, visualize and analyze the massive amounts of data contained in their Teradata system without any specialized IT knowledge or support. Customers running the joint solution may realize return on investment (ROI) through:
- Time savings. The Tableau interface requires little training to use and offers faster, more efficient ways of accessing the data warehouse. Instead of manually comparing multiple versions of columnar reports or teaming with IT to create complex SQL queries, employees can get their own answers to questions, faster.
- Problem solving. Viewing all aspects of a problem graphically, rather than trying to analyze columns of data, enables users to more easily spot information gaps, process inefficiencies and fraud.
Whether the issue is understanding all of the factors related to a drop in frozen pizza sales, mapping more efficient transportation routes or delving into any other business question, the Teradata and Tableau partnership empowers employees of all technical levels across the enterprise to get fast, accurate, actionable data to make better decisions.
Lori Janies writes about business and technology for various publications.