Walmart Goes Gaga for BI
Walmart Goes Gaga for BI
August 3, 2007: HP has announced US retail giant Walmart as the first major customer to pick up it’s Neoview platform for business intelligence.
In a massive win for HP, the largest retailer in the world and one of the most sophisticated users of BI on the planet, will either replace or complement their existing Teradata implementation to build on their data warehousing capabilities. HP could not confirm if the existing Teradata solution would be completely overhauled.
Ben Barnes, HP’s vice president for BI told IDM that HP believes if they can make BI work at Walmart, they can make it work anywhere. “If we can successfully work with an organisation like Walmart, alongside what we’ve already done with Neoview internally at HP, then there shouldn’t be too many organisations out there that we can’t work with,” he says.
For HP’s CIO Randy Mott, the deal brings back memories of his previous role of CIO at Walmart. “When Randy Mott was CIO there, and he’s now here at HP, he pioneered some of the things that made their supply chain so efficient,” says Barnes.
The Walmart deal comes off the back of a year long process of testing and building on the Neoview platform. “We tested the workload in our environment and they were so impressed they went into a partnership with us,” says Barnes. “They’ve been advising us on some of the features and functions and the demands they need to put into the system.”
HP released the Neoview platform earlier this year based on technology acquired by Knightsbridge. The release marks HP’s first foray into the BI market and a major step towards grabbing a major segment of the enterprise information management market.
Locally, HP’s Neoview spokesperson for Australia and New Zealand Colin Moore, says although the enterprise market is smaller, there is still plenty of market potential for local uptake of the platform. “We’re talking to the top tier of companies here in Australia. This is a particularly capable engine with huge potential, but you wouldn’t give it to the local corner shop,” he says.
”We’re talking somewhere between 30 and 50 potential customers here in Australia. It is an enterprise data warehousing platform, so we’re aiming it at the enterprise market and the larger companies doing business in ANZ.
“Australia is going through an evolution,” continues Moore. “There are more and more companies out there who see the need for these capabilities. While there are very few green-fields available, there are still those who tried but have not been too successful with their existing implementations.”