Teradata Debuts Interactive Customer Engagement Offering

Bringing together a host of technologies that include big data analytics, a master customer repository, and real-time decisioning, Teradata this week launched its data-driven marketing offering Interactive Customer Engagement.

With this solution, Teradata, which acquired several companies in recent years, including cloud-based digital messaging and email marketing provider eCircle, cloud marketing automation platform Aprimo, and analytics company Aster Data Systems, now known as Teradata Aster, is seeking to connect the more "traditional" data housed in an enterprise warehouse with unstructured digital data.

"Once [a marketer] gains insights using Teradata Aster, the question is, 'How do they then respond through our Teradata applications capability, which includes our Real Time Interaction Manager, [and make] real-time offers," comments Wes Moore, digital marketing director for Teradata. "This is the basic business problem we're focused around."

Teradata customers were asking for the ability to meld contextual and historical data to create more comprehensive customer profiles, Moore says. For instance, marketers want to understand what online behaviors contribute to a purchase. They want to be able to look at aggregate versus individual behavior and be able to personalize offers and responses based on patterns of purchase or drop-off. This, in turn, enables marketers to target more predictively, he says.

Commenting on the overall movement in the marketing automation space, in light of Marketo's recent filing for an initial public offering and Oracle's acquisition of Eloqua, Moore calls it a growing space. "Customers really want to be able to stitch their understanding of data and insight [to business processes], and I think that's why you're seeing alot of the automation vendors come to bear...they provide that engine underneath to help message and deliver that out," he notes.

The Interactive Customer Engagement offering is a culmination of products that will serve the several hundred customers Teradata has using its marketing automation capabilities, along with the more than 1,000 customers using its eCircle functionality. Teradata's base warehousing offering has a customer count in the thousands, Moore says.