Bringing Back The Swagger

In the days preceding the Teradata EMEA Universe 2017 — held from 2-5 April at Nice, France — the rains played spoilsport. But surprisingly on day one of the conference, the sun came out. Perhaps, it was a sign of sunny days ahead for Teradata — new business opportunities and cloud computing!

The energy levels at the annual event — where Teradata ecosystem of customers, partners, analysts and press among others, come together to reflect on the year gone by and discuss the way forward — were at an all-time high. The optimism was reflected in Teradata CEO Victor Lund’s opening remarks. Directing a comment at employees he said, “Put the swagger back in your step. I want you to believe in yourself and know that you represent the very best in the areas in which we work.”

The theme for this year’s event was: data, analytics and business outcomes.

“We spent the last year developing a strategy to put customer in focus. We spent time trying to understand what customers want and how we could help with analytics, and creating new deployment options on the technology side. We have also managed to re-energise our folks (employees),” said Lund.

Last year, the company did something it had never attempted before: embraced open source Hadoop, the cloud and software-defined architecture. It also entered big data consulting and business intelligence consulting services. Veteran Peter Mikkelsen, Executive Vice-President, International, Teradata, said he has never seen so many changes happening in the history of the company. “Last year brought more change than the preceding 10 years. We are dealing with the largest customers in the world who have the most complex issues in analytics, so technology is very important,” he said.

So what exactly does Teradata do and how is it helping customers?
To begin with, it provides data warehouse solutions, business analytics and intelligence services. It delivers technology-enabled solutions in areas ranging from operational excellence, asset optimisation, to customer experience, product innovation, and risk mitigation.

For a long time, Teradata sold hardware boxes (integrated solution) for data warehousing. Well, the hardware boxes are still around, but now Teradata is becoming more software defined and moving to the cloud.

Last year, it introduced ‘Teradata Everywhere’ and ‘Borderless Analytics’ and announced the Teradata managed cloud for analytics It also embraced open source, by way of Hadoop — a Java-based programming framework that supports the processing and storage of extremely large data sets in a distributed computing environment. This is the model that businesses are increasingly adopting.

Teradata made three key announcements at this event.

Licensing portability: Teradata is offering licencing flexibility and portability to customers who can now have the flexibility to choose, shift, expand, and restructure their hybrid cloud environment by moving licenses between multiple deployment options. Not only is the database licence portable across the hybrid cloud options (like private and public clouds), but so are workloads, enabled by a common code base in all deployments. In addition, the new licensing model offers subscription-based licenses and simplified tiers with bundled features.

Customer journey and visualisation: Several enhancements to the Teradata Customer Journey solution were announced to give marketers easier access to analytics, dynamic visualisation, machine learning and predictive simulations, thereby increasing response rates, reducing churn and ensuring greater customer satisfaction.

New platform technologies (SSD memory):Teradata announced an all-memory update to its Teradata IntelliFlexplatform, an integrated-data warehouse platform. The upgrades are empowered by solid state drives (SSD), which make it possible to reduce data centre space, while delivering a massive increase in processing power for mission-critical analytics. The new, ready-to-run Teradata IntelliBase platform — a compact environment for data warehousing, iterative data exploration and advanced analytics, and low-cost data storage — was also announced.

BW Analysis
For a long time Teradata abstained from cloud, choosing to remain a hardware-centric company with closed architecture, even while arch nemesis Oracle moved to the cloud long ago. Other competitors such as SAP, SAS and IBM also embraced the cloud long before Teradata.

Chris Twogood, Vice-President, Products & Solutions Marketing, Teradata said, “When we started 30 years ago, it was a hardware proprietary platform. Then we moved some of the stuff (amps, hashing algorithms, binet) out to software. Now we take this to the cloud. It is not about Teradata technology being ready for the cloud. Our customers are only just starting to shift to the cloud.”

Twogood says that Teradata has an advantage for now as “some of the infrastructure of other cloud providers is not working too well.”

While Teradata competes with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, there is also a strategic collaboration with them. The Teradata Intelliflex data warehouse platform now runs on public cloud infrastructure AWS and will soon run on Azure. In fact this has also been factored into its new licensing policy. Teradata is also launching a developer model on AWS that will enable developers to experience its solutions on the cloud.

The other thing to note is that Teradata is going after only the large enterprises, thereby neglecting a large base of mid-sized enterprises. Teradata CEO Lund said in his opening remarks that Teradata wants to help large enterprises with scale.