Over the past couple of weeks I have had the chance to attend both Teradata‘s Third Party Influencers event and TDWI. I always enjoy getting updated on the latest technologies and speaking to vendors about what they are doing in relation to expanding their product offerings and providing value to their customers. Here are some of the takeaways from both events:
Teradata Third Party Influencers
This year a lot of the discussion focused on general strategy and growth. For instance, the recent acquisition of Aprimo enables Teradata to expand the use of business applications within their data warehousing platforms by integrating Aprimo’s integrated marketing management suite within their current processes, etc. with the goal of developing a more comprehensive suite of integrated analytics. With Aster Data, Teradata hopes to provide a broader level of support for big data projects within SQL MapReduce environments and provide support for complex data processing and high volumes of information that require processing in a way not natively available within Teradata’s product offerings.
In addition, although Teradata still holds on tightly to the importance of developing an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW), they are expanding their focus towards what they call an Integrated Data Warehouse (IDW), which implies starting small for companies not ready to implement an EDW and growing through data warehouse expansion into an eventual EDW. Even though not a total change to their general positioning, what this shows is that there is a greater focus on providing organizations what they need (or want) as many companies do not subscribe to a single EDW or do not find it feasible based on their BI use.
Overall, Teradata’s strategy is threefold which is highlighted by their recent acquisitions as well – it includes:
- Helping customers integrate data for analytics (with an estimate of the data warehouse market being $27B)
- Supporting big data -through the acquisition of Aster Data (estimated market of $2B)
- Increasing the use of integrated applications with Aprimo being one example of the development of strategic partnerships (market estimate $15B)
TDWI
I really enjoyed catching up with vendors and colleagues at TDWI. Some interesting discussions centered on data management (i.e. governance, data integration and data warehousing platforms in the cloud, etc.) and its increasing relevance to SMBs as more expand their BI use and as technologies are more supportive of their environments – i.e. hosted offerings, and lower entry points. In addition, the demos I received from Roambi and Metric Insights were great. Roambi provides mobile BI applications and are expanding the offerings they provide on the iPad and eventually will provide mobile BI on other platforms. But despite their limitations, the look and feel of their offerings helps push the bar for companies looking for a self-service feel to BI interactivity and use through mobile access. Metric Insights, on the other hand, is deployed through a browser and reminds me of the Lyzasoft‘s and Yellowfin‘s of the world in the sense that founder Marius Moscovici has put a lot of focus into the integration of collaborative functionality while maintaining a high level of ease of use. As more and more vendors start to integrate collaborative features within their offerings, hopefully more traditional vendors will also move towards providing higher levels of interactivity as well.
