Special Report: newly single Teradata goes on its first date

Trading on the NYSE, a major tie-up with SAS Institute, new product announcements and a strategic partnership with Assetlink - it has been a busy time for Teradata since it spun off from NCR.

By Stuart Lauchlan, news and analysis editor

Best known for its enterprise data warehousing solutions, Teradata was spun off from NCR and began trading on the NYSE this month. It’s now set to carve its own course and is making its way in the world with a little help of some new friends.

Speaking at the firm’s Partners conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, CEO Mike Koehler reiterated his belief that as a separate company Teradata will be better able to deliver on its vision of active enterprise decision making. “Now we will have the opportunity to optimise our business and control how we invest,” he said. “We will control our own destiny.”

The spin-off comes at an interesting time in the enterprise intelligence and analytics space, with SAP’s takeover of Business Objects creating turmoil throughout the sector. So it’s entirely fitting perhaps that the first act of the new Teradata was to announce a major tie-up with SAS Institute.

SAS will bring its business intelligence (BI) and analytics software to the table, which Teradata will embed within its database engine. Businesses will now be able to run SAS solutions within the Teradata database engine, instead of having to remove their data from the Teradata data warehouse and move it into a SAS storage system before applying SAS analytics. The relationship also includes engineering optimisation, joint solutions, joint technology road maps and joint sales and marketing efforts. “We're very excited about this partnership,” said Koehler. “Our coming together is a clear win for the many companies that rely on both SAS and Teradata.”

The two companies said that the partnering was driven by demand from shared customers, such as Warner Home Video. "As a result of integrating SAS and Teradata technologies, we have reduced overall processing time to run our forecasting model from 36 hours to one hour and 15 minutes," said Thomas Tileston, vice president of business decision support for Warner Home Video.

The partnership will focus first on retail and financial sectors, but will cover all verticals. A joint SAS/Teradata centre of excellence has been created with a dedicated team of data architects and engineers from both companies to work with their mutual customers. "It enables companies to leverage our core strengths," said SAS chief executive Dr Jim Goodnight.

“We're seeing huge growth in the amount of data and it's not just the amount of data, but the volume and the velocity,” said Goodnight. “This partnership has great potential for our customers. This will have a very significant impact across all industries, from banks managing risk to insurance companies guarding against fraud.”

Tighter integration?

There will still be competition between SAS and Teradata, pointed out Helena Schwenk of research firm Ovum. “Both companies still compete in each others home markets,” she said. “SAS competes in data warehousing, just as Teradata competes in the CRM analytics and the data mining domain. However, the two companies obviously realise that demand from customers to work more closely together, was too great to ignore.

“The Teradata-SAS relationship works from many perspectives. From a technology viewpoint, the partnership provides a richer integration between SAS's analytic tools and the Teradata data warehouse, pushing SAS functions and algorithms deeper in the Teradata data warehouse and lessening the need to move data out of the warehousing environment for analysis purposes.

“There are obvious time and storage cost savings to be made from analysing the data a lot closer to the data warehousing source providing high appeal to joint customers. Likewise both company's software is architected to store and process (ie Teradata), and analyse (ie SAS) large volumes and/or complex queries that are typical of enterprise data warehousing projects.

“In the longer term the partnership is expected to involve tighter integration between SAS data integration and data mining tools with Teradata, and further on will integrate the SAS customer intelligence, retail and risk analysis solutions into the Teradata warehouse.”

Schwenk also sees the two firms suiting one another in terms of their respective corporate cultures. “Both SAS and Teradata have a reputation for being cautious and somewhat conservative companies,” she noted. “Likewise, both share an engineering heritage and have a well established reputation in the high-end of their respective markets garnering the support of an extremely loyal customer base (especially IT shops). Similarly both companies service the needs of blue chip companies where they have strong presence in various industries including retail, financial and telecommunications.

“This natural cultural fit we believe will benefit the company from not only a technology standpoint, but from a marketing, sales and services perspective as well. Both companies are taking this partnership very seriously and have committed to creating a joint team of architects and technical consultants to help customers make the most of the Teradata-SAS software offering. It’s interesting this announcement comes just over a week after Teradata became an independent company and nicely demonstrates how it is benefiting from its new found freedom.”

Data warehouses

Teradata also used Partners to announce a number of new product releases and updates including Teradata 12, its flagship database offering. The new release boasts 37 new features and 21 enhancements, including an optimiser that rewrites poorly written queries to improve the quality of the data returned. The platform is supported by the recently released Teradata 5500 server, which the vendor says can give customers power savings of up to 75 percent while boosting performance and taking up less space in the data centre.

The firm also announced Teradata Relationship Manager version 6, which now boasts a browser-based interface designed to broaden usage within the enterprise and ease deployment of the marketing automation tool set. A new suite of professional services was launched focused around eight areas, including data governance and master data management, and the Availability Management Services portfolio was released to help customers minimise risk and maximise uptime.

This ease of use aspect is likely to become increasingly vital according to Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg who warned that companies are going to need to start paying closer attention to their data warehouses. "Data warehouses that are more than 10 years old need to be replaced to do the things people are now expecting them to be able to do as they can no longer handle the loads and do the job needed. It's a matter of changing expectations. We just didn't know 10 years ago what we'd be doing with data warehouses today," said Feinberg. "We barely even called them data warehouses then."

But nowadays it’s different, he noted. By the close of 2009, 90 percent of Global 2000 companies will have at least one mission critical business application reliant on the data warehouse. "The bottom line is data warehouses are mission critical, it's that simple," said Feinberg, "If you don't build them as integrated mission critical systems they will become a point of failure."

More thought needs to be given to the role of the user when designing a warehouse architecture, he added. "Everything must now be designed around the worker," he said. "Bottom line, if you don't do it correctly and with them they're going to do it themselves. Do you think you're going to be able to tell someone like that use this program to do your job? It doesn't work that way, because if they don't like it they're going to find some other way to do it on their own."

A busy start

Somewhat overshadowed by the SAS news, Teradata also recently announced a strategic partnership with Assetlink to provide its customers with Marketing Resource Management (MRM) capabilities, in addition to its current Customer Management Solutions (CM) portfolio. The rebranded and ported Assetlink product, called Teradata MRM powered by Assetlink, will be available in both - an on-demand and an on-premise model.

Teradata MRM will integrate the MRM capabilities of Assetlink with its own customer management portfolio to provide a closed loop marketing operations management process for its customers and enable them to better plan, orchestrate, automate and measure the impact of their marketing spend.

“The Teradata CM solutions portfolio, when enhanced with the Assetlink’s marketing operations management capabilities, provides a compelling end-to-end and closed loop marketing system and addresses the serious process challenges faced by today’s marketers,” said Sam Gragg, vice president of Teradata Customer Management Solutions Marketing.

“Teradata’s entry into the marketing resource management (MRM) area is a timely, sensible move for the company,” reckoned Kimberley Collins of research firm Gartner. “By establishing an OEM relationship with Assetlink and rebranding the solution, Teradata brings greater viability to Assetlink with a broader support network for its solution.

“Teradata’s past partnerships between campaign management and MRM vendors have been less fruitful because the MRM solution was 'owned' by the partner or was not viewed as being integrated with the rest of the marketing suite. Typically, Teradata's value proposition around analytical CRM has not been an easy fit with the more operational aspects of MRM. Partnering with Assetlink for MRM, at least initially, will enable Teradata to gain competencies in operational marketing processes.

“For Assetlink, the move provides another channel to the market and a potential point of acceleration for selling its MRM solution. Assetlink provides one of the broader and deeper MRM solutions on the market. But the company has struggled due to its small size and perceived viability to accelerate its growth rapidly. This partnership should bring Assetlink into more deals, particularly deals in which clients are considering augmenting their Teradata campaign management solutions with MRM capabilities for planning, budgeting and project management. “

All told, it’s a busy start to life after NCR for Teradata, but Koehler is excited about the future. "Five years from now, we plan on being the market leader in enterprise data management and integration," he said. "Our 100 percent focus on data warehousing has proved to be a key advantage for us over our larger competitors [IBM and Oracle]. As a free standing company that advantage will be even greater."

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