Intelligent Enterprise

The Teradata Partners (i.e., user) conference is this week. So there have been lots of press releases, some presentations, lots of meetings, and so on. A lot of Teradata's messaging is in flux, as it moves fairly rapidly to correct what I believe have been some deficiencies in the past. One confusing result is that there was very little prebriefing about the actual announcement details, and we're all scrambling to figure out what's up.

Teradata does a good job of collecting its press releases at one URL. So without linking to most of them individually, let me jump in to an overview of Teradata news this week (whether or not in actual press release format):

• Teradata now states that its appliance list pricing starts at $99K/TB of user data, in its definition of "appliance." Furthermore, Teradata signals clearly that the negotiated/street price of its appliances is apt to be in what it sees as a very consistent street-pricing range for Netezza, namely $55-60K/TB.

• Teradata keeps expanding its product family. I'll explain some of the differences among the products in a separate post.

• Teradata is disclosing a bunch of user metrics. They include one customer with 5 petabytes of user data (eBay), 5 total customers with 1+ petabyte of user data, and 35 customers with 100+ terabytes. I'll stop there for now, as Teradata has hinted that more details will be announced around noon today, and the press release may have been sloppily worded in some metrics details (e.g., what does "10,000 concurrent users per day" mean?).

• Teradata is of course announcing a lot of customer wins. A number of them are retailers, online or otherwise.

• Teradata announced a "concept car" system using solid-state drives (SSDs). But it's very early days. For example, development chief Scott Gnau thinks SSDs should save 90-99% of total power costs. Right now they save only 50%. When I asked him to explain the disparity, the clearest answer he gave was "I don't know."

• Teradata announced Release 13.0 of its software, with lots of new features. I'll write about some of those in a separate post as well.

• A lot of attention is planned today for Oliver Ratzesberger's Analytics as a Service idea, which he rolled out earlier this year.

• There's work underway that's getting 20X compression in call detail records, versus the 8X that Vertica claims. I'll post more about that separately.

Let me stop here and post this. More coming.

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