SAP, Teradata Team on BI, Data Warehousing

InformationWeek is reporting that a teaming agreement between SAP and Teradata looks to confront Oracle and IBM in the BI and data warehouse business. According to the story, "The SAP/Teradata deal calls for the companies to provide SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse on Teradatadatabase, and to integrate NetWeaver BW, SAP Business Objects, and the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, an existing software-hardware combo."

The spate of mergers and partnerships is dizzying in the data management and business intelligence space. Perhaps consolidation is the best way to describe what has happened during the last few years and the more recent economic climate has exposed opportunities upon which the more profitable IT giants are capitalizing. With Oracle’s play for Sun last week, the field of Silicon Valley’s biggest names continues to contract.

This announcement between SAP and Teradata makes no mention of spatial data support. But as spatial data becomes increasingly viewed as just another datatype in the database, the likely assumption is that:

1. If an SAP/Teradata customer wants to utilize an existing data store of geospatial data it will be supported somehow.

2. Neither company will make a big deal about supporting geospatial data.

For #2, that’s unfortunate, but for those companies, "spatial is not special."