Teradata

[BI Tragic]

News and views about Teradata.

[BI Tragic]

From today's Australian IT:

Fran Foo | February 10, 2009

DATA warehousing systems supplier Teradata is likely to emerge relatively unscathed from the $17 billion merger of Westpac and St George banks.

Westpac spent about $300 million over several years developing its customer relationship management system, underpinned by Teradata's warehousing software.

The Westpac CRM system is also powered by Oracle and IBM Websphere.

The system was seen by Westpac insiders as a jewel in the crown, enabling the company for the first time to get insights into customers' buying patterns.

It subsequently allocated more than $30 million to train employees on the new platform.

St George Bank is also a long-time user of Teradata solutions.

In September 2008, while in the midst of merger talks with Westpac, St George decided to upgrade its Teradata data warehousing system.

The bank has purchased the three-node Teradata 5550 platform and Teradata 12 database.

Analysts said Teradata was well-positioned to walk away relatively unscathed as Westpac culled its supplier numbers.

The banks are unlikely to rock the boat with data analytics capability and business intelligence. Software maker Business Objects, an SAP company, could come out on top as it is used by both parties.

A Westpac spokeswoman said she could not name or comment on suppliers for commercial reasons, but consolidation on data warehousing was under way.

"In the short term we will bring together enterprise systems such as general ledgers and data warehouses and make some more tactical decisions about rationalising product systems," she said.

"Our longer term objective is to support our multi-brand customer-centric strategy with common IT applications and infrastructure.

"Over time we will progressively deal with more strategic issues such as core product and channel systems.

"We expect the eventual outcome will be a combination of existing Westpac systems, existing SGB systems and new systems," the spokeswoman said.

Westpac group chief transformation officer Brad Cooper had set March 31 as the deadline for the completion of its IT strategy.

The integration of IT, systems and operations will cost $338 million and the consolidation bill will total $700 million over four years.

Meanwhile, it is understood that Rob Lee, the IBM executive who manages the relationship with Westpac, has been a familiar face at the bank.

Mr Lee, IBM's Westpac account managing director, is pulling out all the stops to ensure renewal of its 10-year, $US2.3 billion outsourcing deal, which expires next year.

IBM also supplies technology services to St George but not at the Westpac scale.

Westpac will decide on its outsourcing arrangements in due course.

"We are reviewing the group's IT strategy and this includes defining the target end state for the IT applications, including core systems, and infrastructure of the merged group and preparing a detailed roadmap for the transition to this target state.

"In parallel with this piece of work, we are also reviewing our IT sourcing strategy, which will lead to a clear set of recommendations for contract renegotiation or re-vendoring," a Westpac spokeswoman said.

[admin]

From Intelligent Enterprise:

Oracle and IBM are neck and neck while Microsoft is a distant fourth according to the Forrester Wave report. Netezza, Sybase and SAP get niche nod.

By Antone Gonsalves
February 9, 2009

In evaluating vendors in the enterprise data warehouse market, Forrester Research has found that Teradata, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft lead the pack.

For niche deployments, Netezza, Sybase and SAP have the strongest product lines, according to the latest Forrester Wave report written by analyst James Kobielus.

The findings are based on an evaluation of the vendors against 54 criteria, which are grouped into three categories: the breadth and depth of the vendor's product sets, their strategies for evolving their technologies to meet emerging customer demands, and the vendors' market presence based on their financials, adoption, and partnerships.

Among the leaders, Teradata provided the most scalable, mature and flexible EDW product portfolio, the report said. Furthermore, through its recently released 2550 and 1550 platforms, Teradata offers an "increasingly cost-effective solution portfolio for diverse customer requirements."

Meanwhile, Oracle and IBM have significantly improved their respective EDW appliance-based products' scalability and affordability. Microsoft, through its acquisition of DATAllegro and ongoing development of a massively parallel SQL Server appliance, is heading toward the high-end EDW market, Forrester said. Like Oracle and IBM, Microsoft is using its strong presence in the market for database management systems to enter the data warehouse arena, particularly in the growingmid-market.

Among the niche players, Netezza is building a credible EDW-grade appliance product, but primarily delivers special-purpose DW appliances for mid-market and tactical data mart deployments, the report said. Sybase has become a strong niche player by building its portfolio on top of the company's mature columnar databae, which is optimized for scalable, high-volume queries against large table aggregates.

SAP, on the other hand, has a substantial EDW market presence through its Business Warehouse EDW software platform, which is embedded in SAP's NetWeaver BI product. The latter software is licensed and deployed with many SAP line-of-business packaged applications.

Most SAP NetWeaver BI and Business Warehouse deployments are at corporations that have standardized on SAP software. However, the vendor's EDW and BI technology can be licensed and deployed by non-SAP organizations.

Unique among the vendors evaluated by Forrester, SAP's Business Warehouse can persist structured data to any of several third-party database management systems. This positions SAP to one day break out of its current niche and sell to non-SAP organizations. BothSybase and SAP have a strong emphasis on real-time EDW and BI and target the mid-market.

All the vendors in this evaluation are earnestly pursuing the appliance go-to-market approach. "Of all takeaways, that's the most significant one to come from this research," Forrester said.

In addition, the vendors are looking to meet customers needs for more scalable data warehouses by continually rolling out more sophisticated massively parallel processing, compression, partitioning, indexing, query optimization, and dynamic resource provisioning features. All the above improvements are needed as EDW increasingly becomes the underpinning of mission critical applications, such as BI, performance management, data mining and closed-loop business process optimization, Forrester said.

The full report, entitled "The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms, Q1 2009," is available through Forrester's Web site.

[Steve Bennett]

More detail about the latest Forrester Wave is given in a recent article published on TDWI here. The article makes some interesting references to Oracle, IBM and Microsoft:

Forrester also singles out Oracle's strong EDW push, which the database giant showcased last September when it announced its Oracle Database Machine warehouse clusters. Oracle, like Teradata, has a host of potential differentiators, Kobielus says, starting with the Oracle database itself. Oracle, too, has a strong claim to scalability. "Oracle-based EDWs can scale out to a cluster of nodes that can persist hundreds of terabytes … can support diverse EDW and BI topologies and can process mixed workloads involving reporting, ad hoc query, OLAP, in-database analytics, batch ETL, and real-time decision support transactions," he writes, noting that Oracle, too, has a Petabyte Club of its own -- in this case, an unnamed customer using an Oracle EDW in an active-active cluster configuration of just over 1 PB.

One strong differentiator for Oracle is its kitchen-sink-like application stack, which -- thanks to the acquisitions of PeopleSoft (which itself had acquired J.D. Edwards) and Siebel Systems -- encompasses an enormous user base. Throw in Siebel's vaunted analytic expertise, Hyperion Solutions' BI, OLAP, and performance management (PM) know-how, in-memory database technology, and a number of other assets that Oracle has picked up over the last few years, and you have a patchwork thoroughbred of sorts, Kobielus says.

"Oracle provides sophisticated in-database analytics support in its EDW platform and provides rich caching, compression, partitioning, indexing, cost-based query optimization, and workload management functionality." On the other hand, Oracle must still work to knit its patchwork stack into a cohesive whole. "Oracle's EDW solutions … do not deploy as a single-tier grid of compute/storage nodes, nor have they been proven in production deployments to scale out to a grid of hundreds of compute nodes or scale out much beyond 1 petabyte," he notes.

Oracle arrived rather late in the appliance game, announcing its Optimized Warehouse configurations just 16 months ago.

IBM, for its part, announced its first quasi-DW appliance systems -- the Balanced Configuration Units -- nearly five years ago. For this reason, Kobielus says, Big Blue's InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse line comprises the EDW segment's most "comprehensive" array of appliance-like systems. "IBM provides InfoSphere Balanced Warehouses as a wide range of appliance-based EDW solutions for various customer size and functionality requirements," he writes.

"These EDW appliances can scale out in a cluster supporting hundreds of terabytes, in diverse EDW and BI topologies, and in full integration with IBM's InfoSphere, Cognos, WebSphere, FileNet, Rational, Optim, and other software portfolios," Kobielus continues. "IBM [also] provides robust workload management, high availability, and database security features; and best-in-class information life-cycle management and data governance tools."

IBM, unlike Teradata, and (to a limited degree) Oracle, isn't yet touting petabyte-range scalability. "Though IBM offers strong EDW scalability for most current customer requirements, it does not offer petabyte-scalable solutions in its InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse portfolio -- which is necessary to address emerging very-high-end requirements among enterprises and service providers alike," Kobielus indicates.

"And although it offers low-cost appliances for the midmarket, IBM will be challenged to match increasingly aggressive pricing from other EDW leaders -- such as Teradata and Oracle, with their most recent EDW appliance releases -- and from open source and SaaS EDW alternatives."

On the other hand, he concedes, IBM does have its vaunted services arm to both fall back on and to wield as a lever for EDW growth. "IBM's world-class professional services organization is a significant competitive advantage … [and] IBM will leverage its global services clout to position … [its] expanding EDW solution portfolio into new, high-margin engagements."

Microsoft is a relative newcomer to the EDW sweepstakes. There are lots of SQL Server-based data warehouses, to be sure, but until recently, Microsoft was viewed as a single-digit-terabyte proposition at best. That changed with the acquisition of DW appliance specialist DATAllegro Corp. (last summer) and the introduction of SQL Server 2008 (late last year), Kobielus says. Factor in Microsoft's bread-and-butter SQL Server BI stack, its ambitious Project Gemini and Project Madison strategies, and its creditable middleware and SOA components, and you have a road map for EDW prominence.

Microsoft's drawbacks, on the other hand, are just as obvious. "Microsoft's EDW solution portfolio runs only on Windows platforms and lacks petabyte-scale massively parallel processing, and comprehensive information life-cycle management, data governance, data quality, data federation, and hierarchy management tools," Kobielus notes. The DATAllegro technology should let Microsoft address its MPP shortcomings -- although the timeframe for an MPP version of SQL Server (Project Madison) is still very much up in the air -- but Microsoft does not plan to sustain DATAllegro's appliance hardware model.

"Microsoft does not provide its own EDW appliances, though hardware partners Dell and HP offer SQL Server-based appliances incorporating a Microsoft reference architecture," Kobielus points out.

Microsoft should be able to leverage both its bona-fides and customer inertia to widen its slice of the DW market pie, Kobielus concludes. "Microsoft's substantial presence in the DBMS, OLAP, portal, spreadsheet, collaboration, and browser markets provide a strong competitive advantage," he says. "Microsoft will leverage these positions to deliver its growing EDW solution stack, including future cloud-based EDW services, into fresh opportunities across diverse market segments."

[Steve Bennett]

Forrester has now published their 2008 BI Wave.

I like their methodology and can recommend their research products.

See attached wave report.

[admin]

SAP Business Warehouse will soon run natively on Teradata's database

Chris Kanaracus (IDG News Service) 28 April, 2009 05:39

SAP's NetWeaver Business Warehouse software will soon run natively on Teradata's database for high-end data warehousing and BI (business intelligence), the vendors announced Monday.

SAP and its BusinessObjects BI subsidiary already had partnerships and product integrations with Teradata.

But the vendors' many joint customers have been clamoring for more, and native Business Warehouse support is the answer, said Tim Lang, vice president of product management for Business Objects.

SAP expects the new capability to enter beta testing in the fourth quarter of this year, with general availability in the first quarter of 2010, according to a spokesman.

Under the partnership, SAP will be handling first-line support, according to Lang. Pricing was not available.

The announcement drew a skeptical response from analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research, who questioned how deeply SAP will be committed to selling its customers on Teradata versus rival platforms.

"Business Objects has long been an extremely important partner for Teradata. But SAP's most important DBMS partner is and will long be IBM, simply because [IBM] DB2 is not Oracle," Monash said.

However, another observer said the move makes sense for both the vendors and users.

While SAP has its own database, MaxDB, most SAP customers are using DB2, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server for data warehousing, said Forrester Research analyst James Kobielus.

Adding Teradata support provides customers with yet another database to choose from, in an extension of SAP's existing strategy, he said.

"They are one of the few vendors that allows you to do [data warehousing] on your database of choice," Kobielus said.

In addition, Teradata features multi-petabyte scalability for those customers who may require it, he said.

In turn, Teradata customers who have SAP applications may now look to round out their data-warehousing implementation with SAP and Business Objects software, Kobielus added.

Meanwhile, the partnership could also give new life to long-standing rumors that SAP may buy Teradata.

SAP and Teradata declined to comment on the prospect.

But there are other potential acquisition targets for SAP in the market, such as Dataupia and Aster Data Systems, and SAP is probably not ready to pull the trigger on any deal, Kobielus said.

"It's not clear to me that SAP has thought their strategy through [yet]," he said.