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Talking Teradata, Future of Data-Driven Marketing with John Timmerman

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To some, the concept of data-driven marketing may seem too daunting, too unfamiliar or just too confusing to tackle. It’s not an easy task to piece together what it all means and then implement solutions across the enterprise. However, the 2013 Teradata Data-Driven Marketing Survey found that 80% of marketers will have implemented data automation, management, or workflow processes within the next two years. Being data-driven is the fashion in which businesses will operate in the future. I sat down with with John Timmerman, global marketing manager at Teradata to shed some light on big data, Teradata’s products, and the future of marketing.

1)     You’ve been the Product Marketing Manager at Teradata Applications for more than 9 years. What’s the single most important thing you’ve learned in that time?  I think the biggest single thing is that the customer controls the expectations. Our customers control the expectations of what they need from us and their customers control the expectations of what’s expected from them. If we’re not enabling our customers to meet the expectations of their customers then it doesn’t matter how cool we think our products and solutions are. The true measure of our success is the met expectations of our customers’ customer.

2)     What’s the biggest misconception in the market about big data?  I think the biggest misconception about Big Data is that it’s new and that it’s, by definition, big. Big Data isn’t new at all. Big Data is just a bucket name for all the customer insight that doesn’t today fit naturally into a relational database. Can it be big? Sure. Does it have to be? No. Is it truly “un-structured”? Not really…it’s just structured in ways that haven’t traditionally been instantiated in a data warehouse or relational database. I think it’s also a misconception that Big Data projects can be standalone and successful in a vacuum. Without the re-integration of Big Data insights back into the customer database, there’s little way to operationalize the value gleaned from the Big Data analytics.

3)     What’s the biggest misconception about Teradata?  I think the biggest misconception about Teradata is that we’re solely a data warehouse company. I think that misconception has come about honestly enough…since our biggest successes have historically come from the data warehouse side of our business. We offer applications and analytics solutions that industry leaders are using the world over to differentiate themselves in the marketing place. Don’t get me wrong, the data warehouse is a fantastic enabler, but I doubt anyone ever just said, “I want a data warehouse.” There should be a business objective behind the creation of a data warehouse.  For our customers, many of them are trying to get a complete understanding of their customer data. The data warehouse is an enabling technology for the integration and consolidation of customer data. However, the insight in that data needs to be unlocked, then harnessed, and then operationalized, and that’s where the Teradata marketing and analytics solutions are applied.  The Teradata applications were designed to enable marketing to leverage integrated customer data and insight in the creation of value-rich conversations, interactions and relationships with their customers.

4)     What makes Teradata’s product different than a competitor?  A lot of competitors claim to do very similar things as Teradata and many of their claims are true. Personally, I think the thing that makes Teradata different is the degree of testing and integration that we provide. Our applications are designed to tightly integrate and minimize the amount of data movement required.  Our applications are designed to leverage integrated data that comes from traditional and Big Data environments. Do competitors offer products and solutions that do what some of our solutions do? Sure. Do our competitors offer solutions that are as high-performance, well tested and integrated as ours? I would think not.

5)     Let’s talk a little bit about the product. Teradata’s Marketing Applications solutions include Marketing Operations, Campaign Management, and Digital Messaging. What’s your focus?  Our focus is what the marketplace calls Integrated Marketing Management or IMM. IMM is basically the integration of those three disciplines; marketing operations (including MRM, workflows and plan/spend management), campaign management (including predictive analytics, dynamic segmentation, dialogue/event marketing, inbound/outbound multi-channel communications management), and digital messaging (for email, SMS and mobile communications). While each of those solutions can be implemented as a standalone solution (and can compete on its own merits), so much of the data used by those three disciplines is shared that it makes operational sense to integrate the functions together for more optimal and effective marketing efforts and better budgetary fidelity. In other words, with the integration comes better opportunity to maximize your Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI).

6)     I want to discuss Campaign Management for a moment. Under Campaign Management, you offer CIM and RTIM. So, what exactly do these do for business?  Customer Interaction Manager (CIM) and Real-Time Interaction Manager (RTIM) were designed to work hand-in-glove. Customer Interaction Manager is our primary solution for multi-channel campaign management. It is this solution that allows marketers to design and automate multi-channel and potentially multi-step communication dialogues that are employed to deliver highly personalized and relevant messages to customers across any and all communication channels. Typically these communications are “outbound” in that the marketing is initiating the communication thread. However, many times the customer presents themselves to an “inbound” or online channel. A company needs to be able to recognize those customers and deliver targeted communications at the moment of customer engagement. For these real-time and inbound opportunities, Teradata provides the RTIM module to bridge inbound and outbound communication channel communications. While CIM predominantly manages “push” communications, RTIM allows users to “pull” communication messages/offers in real-time (based on offer qualification rules and business arbitration schemes) that best meet the latest needs of each individual consumer.

7)     How will marketers be managing campaigns in 25 years?  Geez, I wish I knew. When I started with Teradata 24 years ago, had I known exactly how marketers would be managing campaigns in 2014, I would have been branded a lunatic. In the technology field, 25 years is a lifetime. 25 years ago, everyone had a physical mailing address and a home phone. Very few knew of email and nobody owned a smartphone. Twitter and Facebook didn’t exist and nobody did commerce over the web. However, by having a technology that was extensible, Teradata has been able to help our customers blend newer channels with more traditional communication channels to continue to engage customers on their home turf. I have no preconceptions that technology will cease to evolve in 2015, let alone 2039. There will be new channels and new devices and new paradigms that will continue to disrupt the way we do business today. But, as long as our solutions are built to be modular and extensible to include new technologies and channels, our customers will be able to blend newer emerging technologies with the proven technologies already represented in their marketing ecosystem.

8)     What does it take to be a successful marketing applications company?  You’ve got to be agile recognize that “data” takes many forms and those many forms require robust applications to extract the customer insight and value. Had we clung to the way we did marketing and customer data integration in the 80’s, we would have gone the way of the dinosaurs. Fortunately, we understood that there’s evolution and acceleration in the way businesses need to market to their consumers and we built our solutions to be flexible enough to accommodate new customer data sources and interactional channels. We’ve also been able to increase the performance of our solutions to keep up with the rigors of interacting with an “always on” consumer. To be a successful marketing applications company, you have to solve the operational needs of the marketplace today while enabling an infrastructure that can rapidly change directions and include emerging channels and applications. Operational excellence combined with the flexibility to add new channels and initiatives as demanded by an agile marketplace. That’s what’s required to be a successful marketing applications company.

Explore John’s past blog posts:

CIM: http://blogs.teradata.com/teradata-applications/bigger-better-faster-mobile-know-more-do-more-with-teradata-customer-interaction-manager/

The Creep Factor: http://blogs.teradata.com/teradata-applications/defining-the-creep-factor-part-1-in-a-4-part-series/

Take the next step by downloading the new eBook series on campaign management.


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