Power to the People: Vantage Analyst in Action

I’m just back from the Teradata Universe conference in Denver and want to thank everyone there for their excitement and positive feedback on our Vantage Analyst product launch. Our customers have known about Vantage's analytic capabilities since the platform announcement last year, but with Vantage Analyst, the power of these capabilities – such as path analytics, predictive modeling, workflow design and scheduling, and coming in the next month, text and cluster analytics – is now available with easy-to-use web tools leveraging simple point-and-click interfaces. As we showed in Denver, Vantage analyst enables the business analyst to perform self-service machine learning without coding.

Our demo around predictive equipment failure to highlight ‘Vantage Analyst in Action’ was particularly well-received and showcased capabilities for the business analyst to deliver tangible business value at key steps in the analytic lifecycle, from discovery to prediction to automation.

This story started with discovery using text analytics on field notes captured by service teams. Every company with customers and call center support data can uncover valuable insights using the Vantage text analytic functions. Teradata Vantage scales to parse through millions of words, surfaces key terms and phrases to give clues to underlying issues, and helps the business analyst form a hypothesis.

This was followed with integrating event data and using the visual path tool to show patterns in the life/journey of equipment that lead to repairs and breakdowns. With a simple ‘Event A to Event B’ style interface, the path tool encourages exploration of data and can uncover hidden patterns. Ultimately, this can prompt proactive engagement with a machine before an equipment failure takes place.

The powerful predictive capabilities of our Machine Learning Engine were then leveraged by the cluster and model tools in Vantage Analyst to score the equipment for risk of failure, giving a targeted list of equipment requiring immediate attention. And finally, everyone’s favorite, the workflow tool was put into action to enable the organization to easily design, deploy and schedule this analytic process to be part of business operations to deliver immediate value. In this predictive equipment failure story, this nightly workflow keeps service teams one step ahead of costly equipment failures.

I believe these capabilities are a powerful game changer. The smart people who drive real business innovation may not all be coders. With Vantage Analyst, they can explore data with Vantage’s analytic capabilities and uncover insights that may lead to that next big thing. Afterall, that’s why data and analytics are integrated together – so that you and your teams can find value. These tools enable more and more of your teams to chase their ideas. It’s a simple formula, the more people chasing ideas and being innovative, the more business value will be uncovered. Let’s empower them!
And that’s the take-away message from the Teradata Universe conference. The people in your enterprise are the key to innovation. Data and analytics are an important foundation, but it’s their curiosity and creativity that will uncover and recognize business opportunities. Vantage Analyst give them easy to use, self-service tools to leverage the underlying capabilities of the Vantage platform – no coding required – freeing them to run at full speed to chase their ideas.