Oracle, Teradata, and Revenge of the Legacy Database Vendors

These old dogs have learned some new tricks

Long-established database providers—IBM, Oracle, SAP, Teradata, et al.—are often referred to as “legacy” vendors, a term used derisively to imply they are expensive, entrenched, siloed, and outdated.

But these old database dogs are learning new tricks. It would be a mistake to think their best days are behind them.

My view is that the so-called traditional database providers will be hard to displace because they have long-established customer relationships, they are proficient in hybrid cloud environments (because so many of their customers are still on premises), and they continue to innovate as they race to keep up with cloud-native startups.

Not only that, but the potential pain, costs, and risks of migrating away from these installed database management systems are a strong incentive to IT teams to stay put. In many cases, those DBMSes represent years of investment, and changes are not to be taken lightly.

Recent developments by Oracle and Teradata—which together have been around for …