Teradata has its eyes on getting access to more marketing Big Data through the planned acquisition of Cloud digital marketing firm eCircle.
Teradata already has Aprimo’s Integrated Marketing Management offering in its portfolio. It will team this with eCircle’s digital messaging which will result in, according to Teradata, “integrated customer experiences across online and offline channels that leverage Big Data insights to grow existing customers, attract new customers, and increase revenues.”
The combined Teradata, Aprimo, and eCircle offering will include:
- An Integrated Marketing Management solution that provides access to all marketing applications from the Cloud - including digital, campaign and operational - thus enabling faster time to market, higher ease of use, and less IT complexity.
- Ability to easily create targeted, personalised digital campaigns that are among the world's most robust in their compliance with security and privacy regulations.
- A digital messaging platform for social, mobile, web and email that can scale to support hundreds of billions of messages a year.
- Multi-channel data management, advanced segmentation and optimisation.
- Access to digital marketing services such as messaging, content creation, best practices and lead generation delivered by Aprimo.
- Big Data analytics from Teradata and Teradata Aster that turns content from social, mobile, web and email channels into actionable insights.
- Unified reporting.
- eCircle will also be available as a standalone solution for the digital marketer.
Mike Koehler, Teradata CEO, told MyCustomer.com that marketing is seen as a key target market for the firm. “There aren’t that many companies that were in Marketing Resource Management in a meaningful way,” he said. “Prior to our acquisition, Aprimo was suggesting that there would be a category of Integrated Marketing Management (IMM). Gartner just published its first IMM Magic Quadrant.
“But there are lots of segments in the marketing space. You get Magic Quadrants around MRM, email management, campaign management and so on. Where the opportunity is is to bring it all together and buffer it in a Cloud software as a service capability. It’s an interesting space. We do need to be careful how we design this.”
“But there are lots of segments in the marketing space. You get Magic Quadrants around MRM, email management, campaign management and so on. Where the opportunity is is to bring it all together and buffer it in a Cloud software as a service capability. It’s an interesting space. We do need to be careful how we design this.”
Big Data = Big Opportunity
It’s where Big Data comes into the picture that really presents an opportunity for Teradata, reckons Madan Sheina of research house Ovum. “Teradata firmly believes that marketing functions in organisations are a key driver of analytics software adoption,” he notes. “This explains why the company developed its own multi-channel campaign-management suite 11 years ago. Recognizing that marketing is key to leveraging new, emerging types of data, Teradata sharpened its focus with its $525m acquisition of Aprimo in December 2010.
“The Big Data part of the puzzle has been addressed by the acquisition of Aster Data. Teradata argues that it will be marketing departments that will be the pioneers for analytics innovation for new types of data being sourced from social media, mobile networks, and sensor-based devices.”
According to Forrester Research, over 45% of surveyed clients' big data initiatives address marketing.
For his part, Ovum’s Sheina argues that for Teradata the challenging thing about Big Data is not the volume but the complexity of the data, and how quickly it changes. “These types of marketing-cum-Big Data analytics are commonplace across Teradata’s key industry sector focus areas: telecoms, financial, and retail,” he adds. “Teradata is also eyeing new analytics opportunities for Big Data analytics in areas including geo-science (seismic sensor data analysis) and utilities (smart metering).
“Teradata has clearly placed a big bet on Aster’s hybrid SQL approach to taming Big Data analytically. This coupled with Aprimo’s marketing data management capabilities provides an immediate opportunity to help organisations better understand customer behaviour and refine their marketing campaigns.”
It’s coming up to five years since Teradata spun off out of NCR as a fully-fledged software firm in its own right. While it has skin in the marketing space and is making claims for its Cloud Computing offering, the company is still best known for its Data Warehousing expertise.
“Teradata is synonymous with building large data warehouses,” comments Sheina. “ This remains a core business for the company, which has continued to advance the core capabilities of its database platform. Teradata 14 is another huge release, packing in more than 80 new and enhanced features.
“One significant inclusion is a hybrid row-columnar capability that comes with enhanced compression and performance advantages. Columnar is not new and Teradata is somewhat late to the party, but its response is considered. Unlike other vendors, Teradata is not offering columnar capabilities as a separate appliance where data needs to be replicated and moved into it. Instead, it is offered as a physical design choice for applications where it makes most sense, notably selective queries on a mix of rows and columns in the same table.”
