Pricing
How to tell Teradata’s product lines apart
Once Netezza hit the market, Teradata had a classic “disruptive” price problem – it offered a high end product, at a high price, sporting lots of features that not all customers needed or were willing to pay for. Teradata has at times slashed prices in competitive situations, but there are obvious risks to that, especially when a customer already has a number of other Teradata systems for which it paid closer to full price.
This year, Teradata has introduced a range of products that flesh out its competitive lineup. There now are three mainstream Teradata offerings, plus two with more specialized applicability. Teradata no longer has to sell Cadillacs to customers on Corolla budgets.
But how do we tell the five Teradata product lines apart? The names are confusing, both in their hardware-vendor product numbers and their data-warehousing-dogma product names, especially since in real life Teradata products’ capabilities overlap. Indeed, Teradata executives freely admit that the Teradata Data Mart Appliance 551 can run smaller data warehouses, while the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2550 is positioned in large part at what Teradata quite reasonably calls data marts.
When one looks past the difficulties of naming, Teradata’s product lineup begins to make more sense. Let’s start by considering the three main Teradata products.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing, Teradata | 9 Comments |
Oracle notes
I spent about six hours at Oracle today — talking with Andy Mendelsohn, Ray Roccaforte, Juan Loaiza, Cetin Ozbutun, et al. — and plan to write more later. For now, let me pass along a few quick comments. Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Parallelization, Pricing, Storage, Theory and architecture | 6 Comments |
Vertica offers some more numbers
Eric Lai interviewed Dave Menninger of Vertica. Highlights included:
- $20 million in trailing revenue. Removing a single multi-million-dollar deal from the list, that’s a few hundred thousand dollars each for 50ish customers. At $100K or so per terabyte, that’s an average of several terabytes of user data each, or more depending on what you assume about discounting.
- Dave used a figure of $100K per terabyte of user data, down from the $150K Vertica has previously used.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Market share, Pricing, Vertica Systems | 1 Comment |
A data warehouse pricing complication: Software vs. appliances
Juan Loaiza of Oracle disagrees with a number of my opinions. We plan to talk about some of that when I visit on Thursday, after Teradata Partners. 
But I’d like to throw one of his ideas out there right now. Juan contends that comparisons of Oracle Exadata pricing are apt to be misleading because — among other reasons — Oracle licenses can be reused on other hardware, in ways that appliance software can not. (The same reasoning would of course apply to almost everybody else except Teradata and Netezza.) Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Greenplum pricing
Edit: Actually, this post is completely incorrect. The $20K/terabyte is for software only. So far, my attempts to get Greenplum to estimate hardware costs have been unsuccessful.
Greenplum’s Scott Yara was recently quoted citing a $20K/terabyte figure for Greenplum pricing. That naturally raises the question:
Greenplum charges around $20K/terabyte of what?
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Pricing | 3 Comments |
Oracle Database Machine and Exadata pricing: Part 2
My Oracle Database Machine and Exadata pricing spreadsheet has been updated. Specifically:
- The first page has been modestly altered to accommodate more chargeable software options, as per the discussion below.
- Accordingly, my new estimate for HP Oracle Database Machine list price is $5,546,000. Per-terabyte prices (user data) are $60K and $198K for the two configurations.
- There’s a whole new second page, for Exadata configurations smaller than a full Oracle Database Machine. Most of the work on that was done by Bence Arató of BI Consulting (Hungary), who graciously gave me permission to post it.
- The lowest per-terabyte Exadata price estimates are about 20% lower than for the full Oracle Database Machine. The difference is due mainly to eliminating Real Application Clusters for a single-node SMP machine, and secondarily to rounding down slightly on server hardware capacity. But these are rough estimates, as neither Bence nor I is a hardware pricing guy.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 8 Comments |
Eric Lai on Oracle Exadata, and some addenda
Eric Lai offers a detailed FAQ on Oracle Exadata, including a good selection of links and quotes. I’d like to offer a few comments in response: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 4 Comments |
Oracle Exadata list pricing
The figures in this post have now been updated. There’s a new spreadsheet at that link as well.
I’ve been trying to figure out how much Oracle Exadata actually costs. My first cut comes up with prices of $58-190K/TB (user data), based on a total system price of $5,322,000, and user data figures of 28 and 92.4 TB for the two available sizes of disk drive. But of course there are a lot of uncertainties in these figures. You can use this spreadsheet (Edit: That’s the old one) to see where the final numbers come from, and to modify the estimates as you see fit. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 10 Comments |
Cognos/State of Massachusetts scandal
I assumed this had been reported widely outside of Massachusetts, but a web search suggests otherwise.
The story is this: Cognos sold 20,000 seats of software to Massachusetts for $13 million. There were technical violations of purchase procedures, and other aspects of the deal that didn’t pass the smell test. After IBM bought Cognos, the deal was rescinded, and is being rebid. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Cognos, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Data warehouse appliance power user TEOCO
If you had to name super-high-end users of data warehouse technology, your list might start with a few retailers, credit data processors, and telcos, plus the US intelligence establishment. Well, it turns out that TEOCO runs outsourced data warehouses for several of the top US telcos, making it one of the top data warehouse technology users around.
A few weeks ago, I had a fascinating chat with John Devolites of TEOCO. Highlights included:
- TEOCO runs a >200 TB DATAllegro warehouse for a major US telco. (When we hear about a big DATAllegro telco site that’s been in production for a while, that’s surely the one they’re talking about.)
- TEOCO runs around 450 TB total of DATAllegro databases across its various customers. (When Stuart Frost blogs of >400 TB “systems,” that may be what he’s talking about.)
- TEOCO likes DATAllegro better than Netezza, although the margin is now small. This is mainly for financial reasons, specifically price-per-terabyte. When TEOCO spends its own money without customer direction as to appliance brand, it buys DATAllegro.
- TEOCO runs at least one 50 TB Netezza system — originally due to an acquisition of a Netezza user — with more coming. There also is more DATAllegro coming.
- TEOCO feels 15-30 concurrent users is the current practical limit for both DATAllegro and Netezza. That’s greater than it used to be.
- Netezza is a little faster than DATAllegro on a few esoteric queries, but the difference is not important to TEOCO’s business.
- Official price lists notwithstanding, TEOCO sees prices as being in the $10K/TB range. DATAllegro’s price advantage has shrunk greatly, as others have come down to more or less match. However, since John stated his price preference for DATAllegro as being in the present tense, I presume the price match isn’t perfect.
- Teradata was never a serious consideration, for price reasons.
- In the original POC a few years ago, the incumbent Oracle — even after extensive engineering — couldn’t get an important query down under 8 hours of running time. DATAllegro and Netezza both handled it in 2-3 minutes. Similarly, Oracle couldn’t get the load time for 100 million call detail records (CDRs) below 24 hours.
- Applications sound pretty standard for telecom: Lots of CDR processing — 550 million/day on the big DATAllegro system cited above. Pricing and fraud checking. Some data staging for legal reasons (giving the NSA what it subpoenas and no more).
| Categories: Analytic technologies, DATAllegro, Data mart outsourcing, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing, Specific users, TEOCO, Telecommunications | 6 Comments |
Vertica update
Another TDWI conference approaches. Not coincidentally, I had another Vertica briefing. Primary subjects included some embargoed stuff, plus (at my instigation) outsourced data marts. But I also had the opportunity to follow up on a couple of points from February’s briefing, namely:
Vertica has about 35 paying customers. That doesn’t sound like a lot more than they had a quarter ago, but first quarters can be slow.
Vertica’s list price is $150K/terabyte of user data. That sounds very high versus the competition. On the other hand, if you do the math versus what they told me a few months ago — average initial selling price $250K or less, multi-terabyte sites — it’s obvious that discounting is rampant, so I wouldn’t actually assume that Vertica is a high-priced alternative.
Vertica does stress several reasons for thinking its TCO is competitive. First, with all that compression and performance, they think their hardware costs are very modest. Second, with the self-tuning, they think their DBA costs are modest too. Finally, they charge only for deployed data; the software that stores copies of data for development and test is free.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Columnar database management, Data warehousing, Database compression, Pricing, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
ParAccel pricing
I made a round of queries about data warehouse software or appliance pricing, and am posting the results as I get them. Earlier installments featured Teradata and Netezza. Now ParAccel is up.
ParAccel’s software license fees are actually very simple — $50K per server or $100K per terabyte, whichever is less. (If you’re wondering how the per-TB fee can ever be the smaller one, please recall that ParAccel offers a memory-centric approach to sub-TB databases.)
Details about how much data fits on a node are hard to come by, as is clarity about maintenance costs. Even so, pricing turns out to be one of the rare subjects on which ParAccel is more forthcoming than most competitors.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, ParAccel, Pricing | 3 Comments |
Netezza pricing
In connection with the announcement of the Teradata 2500, I asked some Teradata competitors about pricing. Netezza’s response amounted to “We don’t disclose list pricing, but our cheapest system handles about 3 1/4 TB and sells for under $200K.” So Netezza’s actual pricing is well below the list price of the Teradata 2500.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing, Teradata | 10 Comments |
Teradata introduces lower-cost appliances
After months of leaks, Teradata has unveiled its new lines of data warehouse appliances, raising the total number either from 1 to 3 (my view) or 0 to 2 (what you believe if you think Teradata wasn’t previously an appliance vendor). Most significant is the new Teradata 2500 series, meant to compete directly with the smaller data warehouse specialists. Highlights include:
- An oddly precise estimated capacity of “6.12 terabytes”/node (user data). This estimate is based on 30% compression, which is low by industry standards, and surely explains part of the price umbrella the Teradata 2500 is offering other vendors.
- $125K/TB of user data. Obviously, list pricing and actual pricing aren’t the same thing, and many vendors don’t even bother to disclose official price lists. But the Teradata 2500 seems more expensive than most smaller-vendor alternatives.
- Scalability up to 24 nodes (>140 TB).
- Full Teradata application-facing functionality. Some of Teradata’s rivals are still working on getting all of their certifications with tier-1 and tier-2 business intelligence tools. Teradata has a rich application ecosystem.
- What will be controversial performance, until customer-benchmark trends clearly emerge.
