A new man for a new year

Editor's note: At beginning of this year, Simon Yang replaced Cliff Wu as the vice president of Teradata for the Greater China Area (GCA), one of the world's largest data warehousing and enterprise analytical solution providers. Yang was the former general manager of Teradata East China. In a recent interview with China Business Weekly reporter Wu Yunhe, Yang talked about why he's confident stepping into his predecessor's shoes and leading the American company's China team to sustainable business growth.

Q: Teradata global revenue saw a slight improvement in its 2008's third quarter results as compared with the first quarter's thanks to the growth in services that offset declines in product revenue. But, the challenge for the company still exists due to the global economic turndown. As the new GCA vice-president, what's your plan to lead the US company's China team to see growth in the coming year?

A: As a customer-focused company, our mission is helping the customers make the right decision to grow their business by leveraging business insight provided by our enterprise data warehouse (EDW). To grow Teradata's GCA business in 2009, our team will focus on the following strategic initiatives:

Growing business from existing accounts:

Providing the right EDW environment, for example testing/development/UAT/production systems and disaster back-up solutions, to improve the analytical application development productivity to serve business and IT users of customers effectively.

Based on local customer analytical application requirements and Teradata EDW business improvement opportunity to develop new analytical applications to serve customers.

Growing business from new customers in existing industries (financial, telecom, post, airlines) by leveraging our global experience and local knowledge on building the EDW solution.

Growing business from new focused industries, such as manufacturing and retail industries, we are very successful in these two industries in the global market. We foresee that these two industries need the business insight provided by EDW to grow its business in GCA quickly.

In addition to launching the internal people development program for Global Mega Major engagement, we will train more external technical professionals who pass the Teradata Certified Professional Program to build the EDW solution for customers.

Q: More companies are seeking ways to cut their costs. Do you think Teradata's products can meet their demands and reverse the current situation? What's your development plan in the Chinese market? Are you planning to sell more technologically innovative products in China?

A: Customers always have cost concerns with IT investment. In the past few years, we have built many EDW systems, which can support the Active Data Warehousing capability in the global market, and we found our competitors' platforms could not provide the same capability as ours. We are the only vendor in the market that can support the near real-time EDW solution at this moment. All competitors claim that enterprises have no needs to build a near real-time EDW. There are customers who don't need the near real-time EDW to make the daily operational decision in the market. To meet this type of customer requirement, we've launched two new products, 2550 and 1550. The price of these two products is better than our competitors' products. We are launching these two products into the GCA market now. We believe these two new products will grow our product revenue in both the global and GCA markets in the near future.

Q: Since Teradata split from NCR in Oct. 2007, it planned a 7-9 percent growth in its revenue. Teradata global CEO Mike Koehler repeated this to the media in Beijing early last year. Do you think your China team can realize this target in the greater China region in the near term? Why?

A: Sure, we will have over achievement regarding this target. The macro economic pace and the market deregulation in GCA did help us to sustain the percentage growth of our business. The growth is better than this target. The market deregulation created more competition and forced enterprises to focus on customer services. All our GCA customers have given us business opportunities.

Q: At the new post, what's your biggest challenge? What's your biggest ambition? What's the biggest 'wealth' that can help you cope with difficulties and ensure business success in the years to come?

A: My biggest external challenge is growing the business steadily under current economic conditions.

My biggest inner challenge is having the ability to deal with daily multiple conflicts externally.

My biggest ambition is leading the company as the undisputed EDW leader agreed to by employees, external customers and competitors in GCA market.

My biggest wealth is the emptiness philosophy, which I learned from Diamond Sutra to ensure I am open-minded without the ego to cope with difficulties and make the right decision to delight counterparts.

(China Daily 01/12/2009 page6)