Wal-Mart, a data warehousing pioneer, is showing that it's not afraid to take a gamble if there's more business in sight to be gleaned from the 800 million transactions generated by its 30 million customers each day.
The $345bn-a-year retailer revealed last week that it's one of the earliest customers of Hewlett-Packard's new Neoview data warehousing system. Neoview will be used in conjunction with Wal-Mart's strategically important Retail Link system, which gives Wal-Mart's 20,000 suppliers access to data about the movement and sales of their products in its stores. In other words, the HP platform isn't being relegated to some secondary business process. HP couldn't have hoped for a better proof-of-concept customer as it tries to sell its new business intelligence platform in a highly competitive market that includes IBM, Oracle, SAS Institute, and Teradata.
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://www.intelligententerprise.com