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« SAP to Acquire Business Objects: What's the Deal With That? | Main | Real-Time Data Availability? Why Not 'Good Enough' Availability? » October 19, 2007Teradata's New Course Up the Stack
For years, Teradata was known as that big, big enterprise data warehouse company for big, big companies. And as an independent subsidiary of NCR. Last week, however, when I made my annual pilgrimage to the Teradata Partners' Conference, held in Las Vegas, I saw the signs of an emerging new vendor. Perhaps one that was looking at the medium-size business sector as well. First, in the week preceding the conference, Teradata become its own entity, spun of entirely from NCR's tutelage. As anyone who follows the IT space knows, this is the era of acquisition, of big fish eating slightly less-larger fish. So, right away, Teradata is going against the grain. Mike Koehler, CEO, joined other executives in a Q&A session and talked about the spin-off. Though it was not entirely clear what Teradata would be doing differently now that it was on its own -- and NCR always seemed to keep its hands off the golden goose anyway -- it was clear the company is engaged in a self-directed push to become more than a "data warehouse company." Koehler's motto is that "the companies who operate with the greatest intelligence and speed will win." He predicted that five years from now, "Teradata would be a leader in active enterprise intelligence." Active Enterprise Intelligence is another catchword Teradata is promoting to describe its new direction -- which is, unquestionably, up the stack, to the business intelligence level. The cornerstone announcement of Teradata's coming-out party was a partnership with SAS, the analytics algorithm provider. SAS applications can take advantage of Teradata's high-availability infrastructure, and Teradata customers will have greater access to analytic tools to run against their data. The foundation of the partnership is to enable businesses to run and optimize key aspects of SAS solutions and analytic processes within the Teradata database engine. Teradata customers will be able to leverage SAS capabilities and analytical functions to utilize the core parallel processing inherent in Teradata's architecture. Additionally, the joint road map also calls for selected SAS solutions targeting financial services and retail to be optimized with Teradata. Was the partnership triggered as an alternative to the SAP-Business Objects combo that now is in the offing? Or the Oracle-Hyperion combo? You bet. The data warehouse/analytics market is maturing, and with that maturity comes consolidation and suites. Kohler was asked, in fact, why he didn't consider buying SAS outright, to which he responded that the two companies already have as tight a partnership as you can get, without the legal wrangling and fees. (Here's to loose coupling between companies!) When asked if the SAP-Business Objects buyout would affect Teradata's relationship with B.O., Teradata VP Bob Fair pointed out that such events most often result in a strengthening of the partnerships already established -- he expects that to happen with B.O. One phrase I heard several times -- uttered by both Teradata and SAS executives -- is to "move the processing to the data, rather than moving the data to the processing." This makes a lot of sense in a world where data -- and the ability to leverage data to compete on analytics -- is now the source of competitive advantage. And, one thing is abundantly clear -- Teradata intends to be an aggressive major player in the analytics/BI space, both through partnerships and its own offerings. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
