August 12, 2010

Teradata’s future product strategy

I think Teradata’s future product strategy is coming into focus. I’ll start by outlining some particular aspects, and then show how I think it all ties together.

The immediate hook here is that I had a short conversation with Scott Gnau of Teradata yesterday, triggered by Teradata’s acquisition of Kickfire’s assets. Takeaways from that part included:

If you want to handicap Teradata’s future data pipelining strategy, you might note that:

While I had Scott on the phone, I brought up a few other subjects too. Highlights included:

Putting all that together with the rest of what we know about Teradata, I’m going to call out three pillars of Teradata’s long-term product strategy:

So far, that’s not too exciting, except in the details of how Teradata’s engineers make that all work. But there’s a fourth pillar to Teradata’s technical strategy as well, and it’s a wild card: tight partnerships. Every time I talk with Teradata hardware chief Carson Schmidt, he seems excited about some particular version of a part or other – sometimes from a reasonably established vendor (once it was LSI Logic), sometimes from a tiny one (notably the “stealth” start-up on which Teradata bet its first solid-state product.) In the future, I expect tight business intelligence partnerships as well. Cognos BI will be increasingly integrated with IBM’s DBMS and hardware; Business Objects’ BI will increasingly be integrated with SAP’s applications; and Oracle’s BI will eventually be integrated with everything. How do you compete with that if you‘re Microstrategy? Well, you try to have superior product, of course – but you also partner as closely with DBMS vendors as you can, an approach Microstrategy has already started. Predictive analytics stalwart SAS, of course, is on a partnership binge as well.

Teradata has a larger installed base than almost all its competitors, and enjoys richer third-party software and service support as a result. But I suspect that going forward, for Teradata to remain a leading competitor at price points it is willing to accept, Teradata’s “ecosystem” advantages will need to ratchet up one or several notches.

Comments

5 Responses to “Teradata’s future product strategy”

  1. M-A-O-L » Teradata Product Strategy on August 13th, 2010 2:13 am

    […] about that later. For now, here’s what Curt Monash has to say about what he heard from them: Teradata’s future product strategy. Single DBMS, capable of meeting all analytic needs while running in a single instance, usually […]

  2. Marcin Zukowski on August 13th, 2010 8:54 am

    Dear Curt, thank you for this interesting post.

    Since you mention VectorWise, I would like to make a small clarification. While we definitely benefit from modern Intel chips (we really like them!), VectorWise tech is not strictly tied to Intel and works efficiently also on other processors.

    Regards,
    Marcin

  3. nandini on September 15th, 2010 3:03 pm

    sir,
    i have got a call letter to work in the stream of teradata.I have no knowledge in teradata. But they said they will provide training.
    I am from IT stream who have programing skills in java and .net.
    please help me by telling about the future of teradata when compared to java and .net.

  4. Curt Monash on September 15th, 2010 3:36 pm

    Rather different things. Teradata technology, pretty much, can only be used for analytic tasks. Java and .NET can, in theory, be used for almost anything.

    Teradata is only used by large companies with nontrivial budgets. In any one city or country, there may only be a few Teradata customers. On the other hand, there may also only be a few trained Teradata developers.

  5. Kickfire unlikely to survive | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on October 2nd, 2010 8:34 am

    […] We now know it’s Teradata. Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Kickfire, Teradata  Subscribe to our complete […]

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