WhereScape Builds data warehouses right, now

We are thrilled to have one of our newer customers, Dan Mosher from United Rentals (NYSE: URI), with us at the recent Teradata Partners User Group conference in Washington DC.

While he was there Dan very kindly sat down with Mark Budzinski, WhereScape’s Sales and Operations VP for North America and Shaun Rogers from the b-eye-network to record a podcast.

Some fo the great quotes include:

“WhereScape promised a lot and the product has delivered.  We are very happy with the amount of time it is saving us in development, as well as the documentation it is producing and the built-in scheduler.  I am very happy with the purchase.”
 
“We estimate the development lifecycle is 20-25% of what it was previously when we were hand-coding.”

 ”WhereScape also gives us the ability to utilize people who are not necessarily programmers, but people who are familiar with our data.  The majority of my staff has been with the company for at least 10 years so they are very familiar with where the data is coming from, and with their knowledge of SQL, knowing what they want to achieve.  It has been a good fit for us.”

 ”We always do documentation, but as most people find, we would make a change but often fail to go back to fix the documentation everywhere.  The ability to click a button and have it generate a web page that is reflective of our data warehouse has been great for us.”

You can hear the entire podcast here.

Conference season is in full swing, and we have just completed two conferences – Teradata Partners User Group in Washington DC and the DW 2.0 Asia Pacific Summit and Workshop. 

Teradata Partners was a great event.  It was a real pleasure to have Dan Mosher from United Networks with us there.  He took the time to meet with analysts including Claudia Imhoff and Colin White, and took part in a pod cast with WhereScape’s Mark Budzinski and Shaun Rogers from the b-eye-network.

DW2.0 took place in Sydney, Australia.  WhereScape in conjunction with MIP were Platinum sponsors of the event.

Coming up WhereScape is speaking and exhibiting at the Europe 2009 Data Management, Information Quality and DW/BI Conferences that take place on the 2-4 November at the Park Plaza Hotel in London.

At the same time we will be exhibiting at PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Summit Unite 2009 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle.

If you are passing through either of these conferences please look us for a chat.

Washington, D.C.  – October 19, 2009 – WhereScape, a Teradata Select Software Partner and provider of a comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing, announced today that equipment rental leader United Rentals, Inc. (NYSE: URI) has purchased WhereScape RED to ensure that the structure of its data continues to meet the evolving needs of its business and markets. The announcement was made at the 2009 Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo in Washington, D.C., where United Rentals is participating in WhereScape’s Booth #132.  

Dan Mosher, Director of Enterprise Data Warehousing for United Rentals, commented, “WhereScape’s rapid prototyping process enables us to quickly understand our data, get aligned with our business users, and build our Teradata data warehouse more rapidly, with the added benefit of metadata-based documentation automatically produced for our end-users and technical staff. We are delighted with the productivity afforded by WhereScape RED, and the more automated, repeatable and documented development environment it supports.”  
“WhereScape provides an attractive alternative for quickly prototyping, building and deploying Teradata data warehouses as well as dependent data marts for targeted BI solutions that can be quickly adapted as the business dictates,” said Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions, Inc., a leading consultancy on data warehousing and BI technologies and strategies.  “Most business users need a bit of help in ‘visualizing’ what a BI application can do for them, and WhereScape’s prototypes, or mockups of the application, have been proven to be most effective in fine-tuning the functionality of the application. We all recognize that prototypes save time and money and ultimately lead to a more successful project.”   

WhereScape RED provides native support for Teradata as well as IBM DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.  WhereScape’s framework explicitly supports Teradata normal-form model table methodologies, just as Teradata practitioners would generate if they were handcrafting the functionality. It builds Teradata objects (tables, indexes, join indexes etc) and generates set based procedures and scripts. 

WhereScape RED utilizes Teradata for both its ELT transformations and metadata storage.  It generates strictly native Teradata scripts (FastLoad, MultiLoad and TPT), set- based code and objects, which are all documented and all automatically included in WhereScape’s integrated and open metadata repository.

“We are delighted to welcome United Rentals as a WhereScape customer and are pleased with the role WhereScape is playing in the development and deployment of its Teradata data warehouse environment,” said WhereScape Founder and CEO Michael Whitehead. “WhereScape RED ensures that organizations like United Rentals are not only developing data warehousing solutions quickly, but that these solutions are easily adaptable and integrate into the existing IT infrastructure as well.”

About United Rentals
United Rentals, Inc. is the largest equipment rental company in the world, with an integrated network of over 580 rental locations in 48 states, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. The company’s approximately 8,600 employees serve construction and industrial customers, utilities, municipalities, homeowners and others. The company offers for rent approximately 2,700 classes of equipment with a total original cost of $3.8 billion. United Rentals is a member of the Standard & Poor’s MidCap 400 Index and the Russell 2000 Index® and is headquartered in Greenwich, Conn. Additional information about United Rentals is available at unitedrentals.com.

About WhereScape
WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which enables organizations to ensure that the structure of their data always meets the changing needs of the business. WhereScape RED is the only comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing that supports the entire data warehouse management life cycle, integrating source system exploration, schema design, metadata management, warehouse scheduling and enhancement into a single, simple integrated design.

More than 300 customers worldwide are using WhereScape RED on a variety of platforms. Projects performed using WhereScape RED typically come in under budget, ahead of schedule, with improved performance, greater transparency and built on more solid foundations over the systems they replace. WhereScape has head offices in Auckland, New Zealand, Portland Oregon, and Wokingham, UK.  For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.

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 All products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Steve Hitchman from WhereScape Europe is to present at the Butler Group BI Symposium in London, October 07-08.

Details on his talk are:

The New Rools and Tools of Data Warehousing for BI: Steve Hitchman, Operations Director, WhereScape
Many a Business Intelligence initiative has run over time and over budget due to the Data Warehouse development failing to deliver data quickly enough for effective BI development. Projects over running and failing to meet user expectations and budget constraints. Discover now how new data warehouse tools and development can be truly agile for effective BI delivery.

We are thrilled that Claudia Imhoff will be joining WhereScape on a webinar tomorrow.  The topic is “Time and Money Lost: What Have We Learned Over 20 Years in BI?”.  Claudia will be talking about what has been learned over the past 20 years, and all attendees will receive a free copy of her latest white paper.

Registrations are at:

 https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=161142&sessionid=1&key=E6ECB5B97A75E74DCCD5563EED7F9AFE&partnerref=2+&sourcepage=register

The full information is: 
Event Date: 10/08/2009 02:00 PM EDT
 
Business intelligence (BI), as it turns out, is not an oxymoron. Companies today are enjoying the fruits of successful BI implementations. Some firms have been at it for 20 years, learning over that period how to get the most out of their BI implementation to maximize value to the business. But for many others, time has been lost and money has been wasted…building robust BI systems has been challenging.

Why have some succeeded while others have yet to figure it out? The key to business intelligence sustainability is a solid data warehouse infrastructure that will support the business intelligence effort. Until the data warehouse is properly implemented, not much good can come from the BI system. And those that have done it well know that data warehouses are living, breathing systems that demand constant change management in order to be effective. Data warehouse projects are not like traditional software projects in the sense that they are never done. They evolve, change, and grow.

Smart BI practitioners and managers build on the experience of successful organizations and use technology that helps to automate the entire data warehouse life cycle, including the elusive documentation so critical to ongoing management. With this approach, they gain confidence that their data warehouse environments will enable them to reap the benefits of business intelligence for years to come, while optimizing the constraints of time and budget along the way.

Attend this event featuring industry expert Claudia Imhoff to learn:
What has 20 years taught us?

What works…and what doesn’t.

How top-notch BI consulting companies have tuned their practices for modern day success.

Secrets of success from world-class BI experts.

All attendees will receive a copy of the Claudia Imhoff white paper, “Best Practices for BI: What We Have Learned in 20 Years”.

The New Zealand Business Intelligence Summit is being held at the Rendezvous Hotel in Auckland on October 8th.

We are pleased to see that there are three WhereScape Software customers talking at the event:  ASB Bank, Courier Post and Sky City.

If that was not exciting enough, I am also talking, with the fine topic of:

Setting the scene: What is the current economy doing to the BI space, and how is BI evolving to adapt to changing corporate customer needs?
Investment in Business Intelligence is growing, despite the economic downturn.  At the same time the market is evolving, with vendor consolidation and changing emphasis.  This presentation will cover the state of the BI market:  the players, the categories, the splinters and the consolidations.  It will also cover what types of projects are likely to be funded and what are not, both internationally and in New Zealand.

This year’s Teradata PARTNERS User Group Conference and Expo is at the Gaylord National Resort in Washington DC from Sunday 18th October to Thursday October 22nd.

WhereScape has taken a Gold sponsorship and will be showcasing the lastest version of WhereScape RED for Teradata.

If you are going to the conference please stop by and say hello.