Teradata on Top 3 Priorities, AWS Partnership, 'Intelligent' Multi-Clouds

In this episode of the Cloud Database Report Podcast, I talk with Ashish Yajnik, SVP of product management for data & analytics at Teradata, the old-school data warehouse company that is transitioning its platform and capabilities to the cloud.

I’ve been covering Teradata for more that 20 years. Here’s an article I wrote for InformationWeek in 2007 when NCR spun off Teradata as a separate company.

So I’ve been watching with interest as Teradata continues to modernize its data warehouse environment, Vantage. Many of Teradata's customers continue to manage enterprise data warehouses on premises, while transitioning to the cloud over months or years.

Yajnik is responsible for Teradata’s product transformation to the cloud, which puts him in the thick of things as the company repositions its traditional data warehouse for use in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. 

It’s worth noting that Teradata Vantage is available on all of the Big 3 public cloud platforms—AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. In our interview, Yajnik downplayed any competition with those heavy hitters, even though they call offer data warehouse platforms of their own. “We don’t see cloud service providers as competitors,” he said.

In fact, just last week Teradata announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft to integrate Teradata Vantage with Microsoft Azure. And in November, Teradata announced a three-year “strategic collaboration agreement” with AWS that includes, among other things, joint product development and integration.

Separately, Teradata has recently announced customer deals with Telefonica, Volkswagen, and Tesco. 

We will learn more about how Teradata’s strategy is playing out when the company announces its financial results for Q4 and full-year 2021 on Feb. 7.

Highlights from the Podcast

Key topics from the interview include: 

• Teradata's priorities for the year ahead

• Strategic collaboration with AWS on product development and integration of Vantage on AWS

• Expanding use of AI & ML in Teradata environments

• Customer projects, including Volkswagen for smart factories

• What Teradata is doing to enable more data sharing

• Teradata’s core strengths in this fast-changing competitive market

Quotes from the podcast: 

• "What we are embarking on is to make this whole multi-cloud journey much more intelligent and not so accidental for our customers."

• "Our customers  require a  unified architecture from both companies [Teradata and AWS] in order to modernize and build their data and analytics platform."

• "We are seeing a ton of interest in the analytics roadmaps, especially in the context of these industry data models."

• "We've seen customers go to competitors, hit a brick wall in terms of their scaling needs, and come back to Vantage."

• "Not all analytics are created equal."