"The key thing is choice," says Chris Twogood, vice president of product and services marketing at Teradata. "We have not dummied it down. For our customers, it comes down to geography or location. Do you want it on-premises inside your data center, or do you want to put it up in the Cloud? What do you want to do in terms of the cash flow model?"
"Our focus is really about providing a complete solution stack, whether you do it on-premises or whether you do it in the Cloud," he adds. "Our model is TCO-neutral. It balances out over about three years."
In the end, he says, the idea is to provide complete flexibility to customers, allowing them to deploy on-premises, in the Cloud or in a hybrid environment as their business demands. Some businesses, like Teradata customer Netflix, have a Ccloud-only mandate, he says. The Teradata Cloud ensures that they can stick to that mandate.
"They've got hundreds of users literally hitting billions of different data points," Twogood says. "They're a company that does everything in the Cloud. They want to be able to do their decision support in the Cloud too."
For other customers, he says, the Teradata Cloud will provide a complement to their existing data warehouses and analytics capabilities, allowing them to expand and experiment. It also provides options for companies that may have perceived Teradata solutions as out of reach, or even for divisions within businesses that are looking to experiment.
"If you're looking to expand, you can do your big data analytics in the cloud," he says. "If you find results, you can easily move those results and operationalize them inside your data warehouse."
Three Ds as a Service
At the core of the Teradata Cloud are three new services (one available now, the other two slated for the first half of 2014): Data Warehouse as a Service, Discovery as a Service and Data Management as a Service.
Powered by Teradata Database, the Data Warehouse as a Service piece is available now in the U.S. via a monthly subscription. It provides access to Teradata Database, ETL and BI ecosystems, managed by Teradata, in a secure and reliable production class environment in the Cloud. Teradata says it assumes responsibility for the hardware/software and daily end-to-end operations via Teradata Managed Services.
Discovery as a Service and Data Management as a Service will follow in the first half of 2014. Discovery as a Service will take advantage of Teradata Aster Discovery Platform to provide rapid exploration and discovery from diverse data via business intelligence, data integration and analytic tools. Data Management as a Service leverages open source Hadoop for processing large data sets.
Teradata is also pushing new capabilities on its appliances. Now it has introduced the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance 1700, providing its SQL engine on top of big data at a price beginning at $2,000 per terabyte of compressed data.
"Before the Teradata Extreme Data Platform 1700, those customers searching for a solution under $US5000 per terabyte were forced to look at a file system or solutions with a reduced setoff features," says Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs. "Our new platform removes the economic barriers, while delivering our best-in-class SQL engine for analysis of large volumes of relational data."
Meanwhile, the new Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2750 integrates in-memory technology with an enterprise data warehouse to deliver up to three times the system-wide performance as Teradata's 2690 platform. Teradata says real-world deployments have also shown a 700 times performance response time improvement.
"The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance provides the best of all worlds-it combines an enterprise warehouse with an in-memory solution," Gnau says. "It is ideal for organisations needing an enterprise warehouse or looking to deliver real-time analytics via dashboards. By simply adding additional memory and installing our software, the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance is transformed into a formidable, self-managing in-memory platform that accelerates the delivery of analytics."
Eying the Internet of Things
Additionally, looking ahead to the Internet of Things, Teradata announced that the Teradata Data Warehouse can now leverage Java Script Object Notation (JSON) data. JSON is the data type used by the millions of sensors and embedded microprocessors that will make up the Internet of Things.
While current Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) technology allows for transactional processing of JSON data, it doesn't allow for scalable analytics on massive data volumes. By leveraging JSON data, Teradata hopes to empower customers to monetize the Internet of Things though the aggregation and analysis of data from diverse machines joined to operational and historical business data.
"The Internet of Things will drive the next wave of data growth and it has the potential to change the world, just as the Internet did," Gnau says. "Teradata's customers will be the first to take advantage of this new technology and drive advanced analytics. And our customers can apply all of Teradata Database's features and functionality to the analysis of JSON data. In addition, they will be able to use the bundled JSON data with JSONPath, without the need to build a separate, isolated platform."
Thor Olavsrud covers IT Security, Big Data, Open Source, Microsoft Tools and Servers for CIO.com. Follow Thor on Twitter @ThorOlavsrud. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, Facebook, Google + and LinkedIn.
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