Office Depot seeks data advantage

Office Depot’s is looking to elevate its business performance with a range of new insights and operational capabilities resulting from an expanded relationship with Teradata.



Office Depot had an existing relationship with Teradata, a leading provider of analytic data platforms, marketing applications and related services, but its involvement with the technology leader is expanding at a time when Office Depot is looking to elevate its performance in the wake of last year’s merger with OfficeMax.



"In today's environment, business and information are increasingly complex. Detailed data integration services and platforms will continue to be central to facilitating our alignment of shared metrics, processes and operational reporting," said Todd Hale, Office Depot’s chief information officer. "We expect our Teradata environment and new database capabilities to enhance our analytic insight and business performance at a time when our data volume is growing significantly."



The newly expanded relationship with Teradata will equip Office Depot with Teradata’s latest enterprise data warehouse known as Teradata Active EDW which is designed to support the most demanding real-time workloads. For example, the system will be able to accommodate unlimited concurrent users to run queries against massive data volumes, according to Teradata.



Office Depot also plans to use a Teradata capability called Elastic Performance on Demand which allows for expansion of production analytic resources on an as-needed and pay-per-use basis. Office Depot is also replacing its current test and development environment with a Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance and plans to implement TeraData Database software.



"We are excited to play a strategic role in the next chapter of Office Depot's evolution as they undertake a complex business and technology leap," said Dean Wold, vp of retail solutions at Teradata. "Data warehouse projects are a critical part of any IT agenda. Today's active data warehouse has evolved into an actionable intelligence hub that integrates data from diverse business units and conveys a unified view of the enterprise. As the business environment becomes more complex, that unified view is more critical. Operational, or 'active' database attributes, become essential.”