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January 1, 2003

The Endless Moment

Highlights from the 2003 Editors' Choice Awards

by Justin Kestelyn

Strategic IT is becoming positively Zen.

Why? There's too much data. There's too little time. The decisions to be made are too numerous and complex. The risks of being wrong — or even worse, of being late — are too high. And humans just aren't designed to operate in full "parallel" mode. (Although some of us bravely, or perhaps stupidly, try.)

Consequently, we rely heavily on strategic business technology to ensure the timely availability and relevance of available data. Indeed, the capability to provide the all-important single version of the truth, and to continuously adjust that truth to reflect current conditions, is the essence of the intelligent enterprise. That ability has helped build legendary businesses around the world. For these companies, there's no past or future — only an endlessly updated moment.

For all these reasons, "batch" is becoming almost a dirty word in many circles. Just as the fire department doesn't wait to respond to a night's worth of fire alarms in the morning, in many cases, your business can't afford to rely on information infrastructure that permits operational problems or opportunities to go unaddressed for days, or even hours.

Rely on Activity

Now that I've set the table, time for the meal: Welcome to our fifth annual Editors' Choice Awards issue, in which we name the 12 Most Influential Companies Enabling the Intelligent Enterprise as well as 48 Companies to Watch.

The company heading this esteemed list in 2003 is Teradata (a division of NCR), which through its gradual but steady fulfillment of the "active" data warehousing concept, has done more than any other company this year to realize what editorial director David Stodder calls "an active, self-adjusting, intelligent system."

As Stodder points out in his write-up, the fact that rapid time-to-decision is compromised by the presence of siloed data sources and applications — why else would integration middleware or federated architectures have such important roles today? — plays into Teradata's hands. Similar to that of Oracle, Teradata's view is that "everything" should be in the database where the best principles of scalability, analytic robustness, and security can be applied.

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The "trusted integrated environment" embodied in Teradata Warehouse 7.0 carries this vision closer to the goal line by "running all decision-making work in a single place, on a single copy of the data, for the entire enterprise," as Teradata development chief Todd Walter has written. Although Release 7.0 hardly abandons the batch model, which continues to be appropriate for certain applications, it strives to meet the need for continuously updated data that fuels timely decision making.

Winners All

There are many other worthy organizations on the Editors' Choice Awards list, some familiar, and some not so familiar (with a special award going to the open-source software community for its unique clout). And the Companies to Watch for 2003 are just as interesting for their contributions to the intelligent enterprise; in many cases, their technology and marketing approaches are what spur innovation across the industry. Congratulations to all our award winners!