Teradata is rushing to cloudify its data warehouse software in the face of SnowFlake and Yellowbrick and public cloud competitors.
The company has already simplified its product set by combining them into Vantage. The next steps are to broaden its public cloud scope and extend self-service capabilities to reduce the need for expensive data scientists.
Teradata today announced it will make Vantage available on the Google Cloud Platform, adding to AWS and Azure coverage. It is also adding support for lower-cost cloud storage options: AWS S3, Azure Blob and GCP storage.
Consumption-based pricing for Vantage in the cloud is coming, with per-millisecond level billing.
The company has also introduced a collection of tools, processes and services to help Hadoop users to migrate to Vantage integrated with public cloud storage.
And it has assembled two offerings to help customer staff run self-service analysis without direct data scientist help. Vantage CX as-a-service is targeted at marketers who need to analyse customer buying behaviour better so as to tailor offers for them.
Vantage Analyst is a way for business users to get the benefit of machine learning and deep analytic routines, again without the need for direct data scientist involvement.
With these moves Teradata will be more able to compete with Snowflake and Yellowbrick Data on their own public cloud and as-a-service grounds.
Teradata is the traditional front-runner in the data warehouse market and historically sold a mix of expensive on-premises software atop super-expensive hardware. This successful formula has been under strain in recent years with revenues falling from $2.7bn six years ago to £2.16bn in 2018,
The prime cause for the fall has been the switch of data warehouse market to the cloud. New cloud competitors include Snowflake, Yellowbrick, AWS Redshift and Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse pose an existential threat to Teradata.
But the company remains financially robust and seems to have the internal resources to make that cloud pivot. The company will hope today’s moves will stop on-premises customers getting seduced off the reservation and return Teradata to growth.
Availability
Consumption pricing for Teradata Vantage has limited availability now, with general availability planned in the first half of 2020. Hadoop migration services are available now. Teradata Vantage on GCP is planned to be available in 2020.
Native access to low-cost object stores is in private preview now, with general availability planned in the first half of 2020. There is no price uplift as native object store is included with Vantage.
Vantage Customer Experience is in limited availability, with general commercial availability in Q1 2020. Vantage Analyst is available now with additional features by year end, 2019.
