Next Week’s Can’t-Miss Webinars

Presenters can either make or break a webinar. Simply put, good webinars are given by people who are passionate and knowledgeable about their topic. In order to give give up an hour of a busy day, I have to believe that it will impart some knowledge beyond product demos and brochure-ware. In looking ahead to next week, I see a couple of high points:

Data Governance: Strategies for Building Business Value
Date: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 at 11 a.m. Eastern
Trillium Software will host a Web seminar that includes featured guest speaker Rob Karel of Forrester Research presenting a discussion titled: Data Governance: Strategies for Building Business Value. If you’ve never seen Rob Karel speak, I can tell you from experience that it’s a real treat. I played emcee to a 2008 webinar with Rob on data governance. It was very well attended and very positively reviewed. At that time, the webinar concluded with a lot of great questions on selling the business case for data governance. In this session, Rob plans to tackle that topic a bit more - outlining the best practices and skills needed to obtain executive buy-in for data governance projects.

How to Boost Service, Cut Costs and Deliver Great Customer Experiences - Even in an Economic Downturn
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11 a.m. Eastern
Teradata and the SmartData Collective will co-sponsor a webinar on dealing with a down economy. We’ve seen a couple of companies cover this topic, but the panel looks very strong. Judging from the panel and the description, this webinar looks to have a CRM-focus - how technology can help you a) provide an experience that customers will love, and; b) cut costs and help you differentiate your communications strategies from your competition. Curtis Rapp from Air2Web will be in on the discussion, so I’m guessing there will be some talk about Teradata Relationship Manager Mobile and using text messaging in your Teradata apps.

The panel of experts will include:

• Dave Schrader, Teradata - published author and long time Teradata employee
• Lisa Loftis, CRM and BI Expert - author on CRM topics
• Curtis Rapp, Air2Web – the partner responsible for some of Teradata’s mobile solution (CRM on your cell phone)
• Rebecca Bucnis, Teradata - another long-time and experienced Teradata employee

For attending, you’ll also get a white paper by Lisa Loftis called Ringing in the Customers: Harnessing the power of Mobile Marketing.

Teradata Partners User Group

Road trip! Next week, I’m heading to Teradata Partners User Group and Conference in Las Vegas, and I’m looking forward to it. The event should be a fantastic opportunity to take a peak inside the Teradata world.

The event is a way for Trillium Software to celebrate its partnership with Teradata. This partnership has always made a lot of sense to me. Teradata and Trillium Software have had similar game-plans throughout the years – focus on your core competency, be the best you can be at it, but maintain an open and connectible architecture that allows in other high-end technologies. There are many similarities in the philosophies of the two companies.

Both companies have architecture that works well in particularly large organizations with vast amounts of data. One key feature with Teradata, for example, is that you can linearly expand the database capacity response time by adding more nodes to the existing database. Similarly, with Trillium Software, you can expand the number of records cleansed in real-time by adding more nodes to the cleansing system. Trillium Software uses a load balancing technology called the Director to manage cleansing and matching on multiple servers. In short, both technologies will scale to support very large volumes of complex, global data.

The estimate is for about 4000 Teradata enthusiasts to show up and participate in the event. So, if you’re among them, please come by the Trillium Software exhibit and say hello.