Teradata targets unified data, better analytics and marketers

By Gabey Goh October 23, 2013

New offerings and enhancements in line with core strategic focus on three growth areas
Company bets big on data warehousing, big data analytics and integrated marketing

Teradata targets unified data, better analytics and marketers TO help organisations address the immense opportunities and challenges of a new business world powered by big data, Teradata Corporation has announced a slew of new products and enhancements.

Taking to the stage on the second day of the Teradata Partners Conference taking place in Dallas, Texas, Teradata president and chief executive officer Mike Koehler (pic) outlined the enterprise analytic technologies and services provider’s strategic focus in three growing market areas: Data warehousing, big data analytics and integrated marketing.

Citing Teradata’s own research, he said that 55% of chief information officers (CIOs) identified big data and big data analytics as the most disruptive digital technology.

As the “biggest game changer in technology,” big data means a lot of things for businesses, necessitating the need to shift from analysing transactional data to understanding customer interactions and behaviour – relational data, Koehler said.

“It can fundamentally change the business or become a competitive disadvantage if not done right. There’s disruption to the IT of the organisation itself – with more data comes more complexity and [the higher] cost of ingesting, storing, working with and making sense of it all,” he added.

Koehler argued that the key for organisations lies in the optimisation of value, where all data from all channels – from past to present and future – must be included.

“Integration of it all is key. It boils down to the genius of the ‘and’ versus the tyranny of the ‘or’ in an organisation’s management of data,” he said.

“Taking advantage of big data is not an option now, it’s a requirement to compete and win in today’s environment,” he added.

All in the cloud

Among Teradata’s major announcements was the availability of all its solutions via the cloud. The Teradata Cloud is an enterprise-class cloud offering which offers pay-as-you go pricing, rapid provisioning, and scalability as needed, the company said.

It includes Data Warehouse as a Service 1.0, available on a monthly subscription – Teradata Cloud 2.0 which offers Data Warehouse as Service, Discovery as a Service and Data Management as a Service is expected to be available in the first half of 2014 with rapid provisioning and scalability, as well as monthly, one-year and three-year pricing options.

Teradata is also offering Data Warehouse as a Service which features virtualised resources, consistent performance and linear scalability.

Teradata targets unified data, better analytics and marketers Another offering, Data Management as a Service, capitalises on Hadoop for processing large data sets in a distributed computing environment.

The company will also offer Discovery as a Service, taking advantage of the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform with SQL-MapReduce to enable rapid exploration and discovery from diverse data via business intelligence, data integration, and analytics tools.

Darryl McDonald (pic), president of Teradata Applications, also outlined the company’s enhanced Integrated Marketing Management (IMM) suite, which integrates Teradata Applications’ cloud-based solutions for marketing operations, campaign management and digital messaging.

In a move aimed at capturing the growing potential of data-driven marketing, Teradata also announced the general availability of its Customer Interaction Manager (CIM) in the Cloud, a solution that enables real-time, dialogue-based customer interaction across digital and traditional communication channels, creating a ‘customer interaction hub’ for the entire global enterprise.

According to a recent global survey conducted by Teradata, demand for such capabilities is high, yet enterprise preparedness to execute on data-driven marketing strategies remains low.

Specifically, 71% of marketers told Teradata they plan to implement a big data analytics solution for data-driven marketing in the next two years. However, just 18% said they currently have a single, integrated view of customer actions, making this foundational step a top priority for future improvement, the company said.

McDonald pointed to a Gartner predication that stated by 2017, CMOs (chief marketing officers) will spend more on IT than their CIOs.

“In today’s connected marketplace, customers have the upper hand and the only way to win is to bring both IT and marketing together, to use technology to take ownership of the intersection where brand meets the marketplace.

“Marketing is now IT's most important client, the biggest generator and user of data in the organisation,” he added.

Creating a unified data architecture

Speaking to attendees, Scott Gnau (pic), president of Teradata Labs, gave an overview of the enhancements made to the company’s Unified Data Architecture (UDA) offering that was launched last year.

In line with enabling customers to better leverage analytics, Teradata in partnership with SAS and Hortonworks also introduce Analytics Advantage Program with Hadoop that expands on the success of the original SAS and Teradata Analytic Advantage programme for in-database analytics to now include Hortonworks, a provider of enterprise Apache Hadoop.

The new Analytics Advantage with Hadoop programme leverages capabilities for in-database data preparation, analytic model building and deployment, and has combined Teradata’s Appliance for SAS High-Performance Analytics offering with the Teradata Appliance for Hadoop built on Hortonworks Data Platform, Teradata said.

Using Teradata’s new UDA, the high-speed integrated offering allows customers to discover, build and deploy analytic models promoting businesses’ ability to act upon analytic insights from any type of data, across a seamless environment and faster than ever before, the company claimed.

Gnau reported that to date, over 50 customers have adopted UDA, a framework for organisations to analyse all types of data on multiple Teradata systems.

It leverages Teradata Enterprise Data Warehouse for historical customer transaction, profile and product information; Teradata Aster to analyse and discover patterns through nPath analysis; and Hadoop for loading, storing and refining data, and optimising storage costs.

“Some might say that UDA is too complicated but in our search for a new market standard, we strive to give you choice. UDA is about ‘best of breed’ choice with ready-to-run solutions coupled with world class software,” Gnau claimed.

Other key innovations introduced to UDA include the capability for customers to add Java Script Object Notation (JSON) data to their data warehouse that will be available with the next release of Teradata Database in the second quarter of 2014. The company’s in-database analytics has also been expanded to include Fuzzy Logic and Revolution R.

In addition the company launched Teradata Extreme Data Platform 1700 with enhanced processing speed and storage capacity. This platform claims to deliver a best-in-class SQL engine on top of big data at a price from US$2,000 per terabyte of compressed data.

The Teradata Extreme Data Platform now offers 3TB (terabyte) drives, and additional optional hot standby nodes and hot spare drives with improved data storage architecture. The Platform leverages the dual Intel Xeon Sandy Bridge eight-core processors at 2.6GHz and runs Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11.

This follows the release of version 6 of its Teradata Aster Discovery Platform earlier this month, with new support for graph database technology with NoSQL and Hadoop data processing capabilities via its new SQL-GR technology, alongside support for HDFS-compatible file storage, with the addition of the Teradata Aster File Store (AFS).

Gabey Goh reports from the Teradata Partners Conference in Dallas, Texas, at the invitation of the company.