Teradata – Key Messages

Randy Lea kicked off the Teradata Third Party Influencers event with Teradata’s key messages:

• The best database for analytics
  Obviously this is #1 for Teradata is to deliver on this with a focus on being “parallel everywhere” while having the database do as much as possible. Also provide a self-service portal for DBAs, offer query rewrite/optimizing, hotspot analysis, workload controls, managed storage etc.
• Architectural flexibility
  Lots of architectural/price point options. Teradata’s basic premise has always been that integrated data reduces costs and, more importantly, delivers greater business value. The core product has been focused on the high end, enterprise data warehouse. More recently they have released their data warehouse and data mart appliances to support smaller, less challenging environments while offering an upgrade path. Solid-state extreme performance and long term archival appliances round out the set, all of which can be managed as a set. Architectural flexibility with a single active enterprise data warehouse at the end of the day.
• Optimized decisioning
  Focusing on making sure the whole analytic decisioning process is efficient. In many companies lots of different kinds of analytics all using their own hardware/data – OLAP, Excel/Access, data mining all separate causing time and cost for data movement and inconsistency. Teradata’s focus is to support all these different kinds of analytics – supporting cubes, direct access from Excel etc.  Teradata is also working closely with SAS (as noted in my blog on SAS in-database analytics) and with KXEN for in-database analytics to eliminate data movement for data mining and predictive analytics – bring the analytics to the data. Plus geo-spatial integration and quick sand box creation (elastic mart).
• Superior Operational execution
  A focus on the front line-active enterprise intelligence. Operational intelligence focused on helping people in call centers, at gates or websites. This means replacing BI tools with web-services integration – from BI to decision management. One of my favorite things about Teradata is that they realize that operational intelligence does not mean BI at the operational front line.

Obviously from my point of view this is interesting. The focus on decisioning and operational systems puts Teradata squarely into the decision management space.  Their focus on higher-end data mining and predictive analytics is one thing but their recognition that operational intelligence requires a focus on services, SOA and integration with operational systems not just more BI is the key.