DAYTON, Ohio--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 13, 1997--NCR Corp. and its customer AT&T Business Markets Division (BMD) have been awarded The Data Warehousing Institute's 1997 Best Practices in Data Warehousing Award in "The Warehouse and the Web" category.
AT&T BMD utilizes the NCR WorldMark/Teradata-based solution to more quickly and efficiently respond to customers by making information more accessible to marketing and sales representatives over an intranet.
The Data Warehousing Institute recognizes innovative solutions to problems commonly faced by data warehousing practitioners. Winning solutions are selected from two finalists in each category and are judged by their ability to deliver large, measurable impacts to the business.
Looking to arm its sales force with a competitive edge, AT&T BMD, a telecommunications service provider to large businesses worldwide, required quicker access to time-sensitive information anytime, anywhere. Leveraging the division's existing desktop tools with an NCR-based data warehouse has enabled the availability of sales/marketing data to its worldwide sales force using standard Web client software and connections. Users can download a query result into a spreadsheet, word processor or presentation package and build charts and graphs from query results. The web-enabled data warehouse solution makes it easier for information to flow throughout the division and has significantly reduced the need for paper-based reports.
"Our users love going through the Web," said Barbara Roberts, platform engineer at AT&T Business Markets Division. "It saves our internal users from having to learn about the data warehouse software or the underlying infrastructure. The bottom line benefits -- ease-of-use, no added software and anytime, anywhere access -- are helping us link a geographically dispersed workforce and improve the flow of information."
AT&T BMD is using the NCR WorldMark 5100M massively parallel processor running NCR's Teradata RDBMS with two 4300 WorldMark systems as Web servers. The system supports 1.5 terabytes of data.
Leveraging this technology, the AT&T division focuses on utilizing the Web to collect and distribute customer billing results, customer collection results, and to audit the overall input/output processes of the data warehouse.
"We are thrilled to have participated in such a creative venture with AT&T," said Paul O'Brien, vice president of NCR's Communications Industry Business Unit. "The NCR systems, combined with AT&T's existing infrastructure, provided a user-friendly solution that required no additional software and was accessible -- providing anywhere, anytime access to mission-critical information." |
