Teradata was one of the pioneers of cloud computing deployment, according to its CEO, and it seems to be planning plenty more activity in that direction for the future - even if it is keeping it on the QT for the time being.
Hosting the annual Teradata Universe Conference in Berlin, the data warehousing firm provided some tantalising hints about expansion in the cloud space.
But the organisation, notoriously tight lipped about upcoming initiatives until it has dotted all the i’s and crossed the t’s, refused to be drawn on any specifics.
However, that didn’t stop CEO Mike Koehler from highlighting the company’s heritage in the cloud sphere.
“Teradata was the original at grid or cloud computing within its own complex. We did virtualised computing back in 1993,” he said. “Our servers inside the Teradata complex were virtual and are virtual today. Our virtualisation of servers inside our Teradata private cloud is in the 80 or 90%. Now we have virtualised the storage and it’s the same thing.”
For Teradata, this distinction between private cloud and public cloud is key. While Koehler has seen the benefits of the private cloud first hand, he harbours some serious reservations about his company’s role within the public cloud space at this particular time – due in no small part to concerns about security, privacy and performance.
“Part of the benefit [of the private cloud] is that it offers a lower cost infrastructure because of the utilisation of resources. And Teradata solved that problem within its own data warehouse complex, because it’s all virtual. So the cost benefit is not that great moving outside of the Teradata complex to a regular cloud,” says Koehler.
“Now, can a public cloud be mainstream for companies to use for data warehousing in the public cloud? I would say the jury is still out on when or if or how long that will move along. In a private cloud, certainly inside of a company that has the wherewithal and resources to manage the private cloud, data warehousing will be prevalent. In a public cloud it is not just privacy but also software as a service has been around for a while, but you need to have availability and service level agreements that are mission critical in the public cloud to put data warehousing there. These are challenges that the industry has to face to get there.”
Softly softly
In October, the business made its first serious foray into private cloud computing with its Agile Analytics Cloud, Teradata Express for VMware Player and Teradata Express on Amazon EC2. And despite its reservations, it has also dipped its toe in the software as a service via its partnership with SilkRoute Global. Furthermore, while Koehler downplays its significance (“We have software as a service or data warehousing as a service today. It is not a big business but it is there.”) others at Teradata appear to view it as an important step.
The company is often portrayed as an organisation that almost exclusively deals with large scale enterprises, and this is something that CTO Stephen Brobst is keen to change - “More than 50% of our customers start at less than a terabyte. Most people don’t know that. We’re positioning Teradata so that we’re not just for the mega monsters but also for mid market.” He suggests that activity in the public cloud space could be one way to achieve this.
“Our initial focus is on private cloud computing as it is more secure and there are also some performance advantages, because public cloud requires moving lots of data from your enterprise to the public cloud. So we believe that for large enterprises, private cloud will probably be the right answer for a long time to come,” Brobst admits.
However, he adds: “But for attacking the mid market then the public cloud will probably be the right answer, once privacy and security issues are addressed. There are also some other performance issues, but based on our roadmap with Amazon we think those will be solved probably around the same time as the security and privacy issues.”
But when will this be? No definitive date is given. However, for the time being Brobst does emphasise that the addition of cloud offerings in its data warehouse 2000 series is due to the fact that the company is attracting interest from smaller businesses.
“The large customers will probably do private cloud computing anyway because the economies of scale within a large enterprise don’t really justify going outside, because public cloud computing actually isn’t cheaper if you’re a big company and have your own economies of scale. But what it will allow in the future - once some of the security and privacy issues are sorted out - is for midmarket and even below to participate in this space, through software as a service and so on,” he continues.
“We have done this software as a service offering, SilkRoute, so smaller retailers for instance have access to our demand chain management without having to own their own Teradata system. They just do software as a service very similar to Salesforce.com and we will probably do other offerings like that in analytics where in the end the customer doesn’t even know or care it is Teradata analytics underneath, they just know it works, that’s all they care about.”
So for the time being, Teradata is taking a softly softly approach with the cloud, and particularly the private cloud. But watch this space for future developments…
