Teradata and Microgen Launch Enterprise Financial Accounting Platform to Bolster Confidence in Reporting and Compliance

SAN DIEGO and LONDON, Oct. 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- With the global financial crisis still top of mind, regulators and stakeholders are demanding that corporations more accurately report performance, and do a better job of mitigating risk and ensuring compliance. To meet this need, Teradata (NYSE: TDC) and Microgen Plc (LSE: MCGN) today announced a joint data warehouse-centric accounting platform that allows companies to drill down from general ledger balances into detailed transaction-based ledger and linked transaction details.

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The joint solution pairs the Microgen Accounting Hub with the Teradata analytic platform to help companies consolidate financial information, execute detailed accounting rules and provide a single point of control for financial and accounting data from across their enterprise. This improves transparency and enables better performance management, two board-level imperatives for all businesses. The robust, transparent financial reporting and analytics are especially suited for rapidly changing industries, such as media, financial services and retail.

"Stakeholders' transparency demands are driving organizations to reconcile and integrate detailed operational systems with the aggregated book of business that is reported to The Street. That has not been done before. The added benefit of this integrated information approach is that by eliminating existing fragmented data and manual processes, companies can view their operational information and answer questions such as 'which customers cost us money, which ones drive our business, etc.'," said Jeanne Capachin, research director, IDC Financial Insights.

Web Seminar Oct. 10
To help companies understand how to base operational business decisions on the same performance metrics and detailed data that drive investor and community expectations, Jeff Lovett, vice president of Teradata Finance and Performance Management Solutions and Tom Crawford, senior vice president, North America, Microgen, will host a live webcast, "Architecting Financial Transparency for Business Value" on October 10 at 2:00 PM ET/7:00 PM GMT. They will share how leading organizations are leveraging a single data foundation and featuring accounting hubs, calculation engines and hierarchy management systems.

"When chief financial officers increase transparency by reducing the number of data integration points, they provide greater reporting consistency as well as better operational flexibility," said Lovett. "Automating data production and report composition vastly reduces manual errors. With our warehouse-centric accounting hub solution, companies can stop spending huge amounts of time, money and effort on data reconciliation and focus on business analysis." 

Traditional financial systems are not designed to provide the analytic capabilities or detailed insights needed to adjust to both current and future regulatory and management reporting regimes. In most companies, data travels between multiple data marts, and general ledger systems do not retain transactional detail or accounting logic. These short-comings raise the risk of uncertainty over data accuracy and quality, and prevent reliable reconciliation of information back to the aggregated general ledger balances that inform the representations made to stockholders.

"When CFOs reduce the number of data integration points, they increase accuracy across transactional source systems and ERP systems providing greater reporting consistency as well as better operational flexibility. This can be applied across many industries: financial services, healthcare, media and utilities, to name a few," said Crawford.

Additional Presentations Oct 21 – 25, Washington DC
From October 21-25 at PARTNERS, the Teradata User Group conference, some of the world's progressive and innovative companies will present sessions on the role of Teradata in their efforts to improve financial, risk, and compliance reporting.

Relevant Links
Register for the October 10 webcast beginning at 2:00 PM ET, Architecting Financial Transparency for Business Value."

White paper: "The Road to Financial Transparency: An Architected Approach to Next Generation Finance Architectures."

Learn more about PARTNERS, the Teradata User Group conference, October 21 – 25 in Washington, DC. 

Read about Teradata's proven approach to "Unleash the Power of the CFO," with simplified finance architectures.

Listen to a podcast that explains the concept of an accounting hub. Microgen solution for Financial Services Customers

Image Available
A diagram showing this new finance architecture is available here: http://bit.ly/VEIvET
Diagram 1, caption: A next-generation finance architecture seamlessly integrates eight key elements that all finance information delivery systems require.

About Microgen
Founded in 1974 and listed on the London Stock Exchange (MCGN) from 1983 Microgen is headquartered in London with offices worldwide. Microgen provides innovative, enterprise class software platforms that help its customers to differentiate their capabilities and rapidly exploit new business opportunities. Microgen software solves problems including the creation of new software systems, the automation of complex business processes, the management of a high-volume or complexity of transactions, and the integration of existing legacy systems and data across the enterprise.

About Teradata
Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is the world's leading analytic data solutions company, focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications. Teradata's innovative products and services deliver data integration and business insight to empower organizations to make the best decisions possible and achieve competitive advantage. Visit teradata.com for details.

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Teradata is a trademark or registered trademark of Teradata Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Microgen is a registered trademark of Microgen plc and is used by Microgen's subsidiary companies, Microgen Aptitude and Aptitude are trademarks or registered trademarks of Microgen Aptitude Limited. Microgen Aptitude - European & U.S. Patents Pending (for more information please refer to our website: http://www.microgen.com/uk-en/company/patents-and-trademarks

SOURCE Teradata