Teradata

Corporate overview

Teradata is an enterprise software company that develops and sells a relational database management system (RDBMS) with the same name. Teradata is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the stock symbol TDC.

The flagship Teradata product is referred to as a "data warehouse system" which stores and manages data. The data warehouses use a "shared nothing architecture", which means that each server node has its own memory and processing power. Adding more servers and nodes increases the amount of data that can be stored. The database software runs on the servers and spreads the workload among them. In 2010, Teradata added text analytics to track unstructured data, such as word processor documents, and semi-structured data, such as spreadsheets.

Teradata has a supplier diversity program that designates a minimum of 3 to 5% of spending on minority, women, veteran, or small business vendors. In 2013, the Ethisphere Institute named Teradata as one of the "World's Most Ethical Companies."

Teradata holds an annual user group conference and expo known as Teradata Partners with keynote industry speakers, educational sessions led by customers and other vendors. The Teradata Partners Conference has been an annual event since 1985. The conference involves lectures and speeches on technical and business topics and announcements about new products.

History

The concept of Teradata grew from research at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and from the discussions of Citibank's advanced technology group in the 1970s. The company was incorporated in 1979 in Brentwood, California by Jack E. Shemer, Philip M. Neches, Walter E. Muir, Jerold R. Modes, William P. Worth, Carroll Reed and David Hartke. In 1984 Teradata released its DBC/1012 specialized database computer. In 1990 it acquired Sharebase, originally named Britton Lee.

In September 1991 AT&T Corporation acquired NCR Corporation, which in December announced the acquisition of Teradata for about $250 million. Kenneth W. Simonds had been chief executive since 1986. In 1992 Teradata built the first system over 1 terabyte, at Wal-Mart. A Teradata database became the world's largest at 11 terabytes in 1992. By 1997 NCR became independent from AT&T.

In 1999 NCR acquired Strategic Technologies & Systems, and appointed Stephen Brobst as chief technology officer of the Teradata Solutions Group. In April 2000 NCR acquired Ceres Integrated Solutions and its customer relationship management software for $90 million, and in July Stirling Douglas Group and its demand chain management software. In 2005, it acquired financial management software from DecisionPoint.

In January 2007 NCR announced Teradata would become an independent public company, led by Mike Koehler. The new company's shares started trading in October. In March 2008 Teradata acquired professional services company Claraview, which previously had spun out software provider Clarabridge.

In August 2010, Teradata acquired column-oriented DBMS vendor Kickfire. In December it acquired marketing software company Aprimo for about $550 million. In March 2011 it acquired Aster Data Systems for about $263 million. In May 2012 Teradata acquired email direct marketing company eCircle, which was merged into the Aprimo business.

In July, 2014, Teradata acquired the assets of Revelytix, a provider of information management products and for a reported $50 million, Hadapt, a company that developed the database management system Presto for Apache Hadoop, and in September, Hadoop service firm Think Big Analytics. In December, Teradata acquired RainStor, a company specializing in online data archiving on Hadoop.

In January 2015 Teradata acquired Appoxxee, a mobile marketing software as a service provider, for about $20 million. In September Teradata acquired email marketing company FLXone, based in the Netherlands. In November 2015, after continued losses and declining revenue, a business transformation review was announced.

On May 5, 2016 Victor L. Lund, who had been an executive of American Stores from 1977 to 1999, became the chief executive. In July 2016, the marketing applications division, using the Aprimo brand, was sold to private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners for about $90 million. This was hundreds of millions less than it paid making the acquisitions of several companies merged into the unit. Marlin combined businesses of the former eCircle, Appoxee, and Ozone businesses with an email marketing company BlueHornet (that it had acquired in 2015), using the brand Mapp Digital in September 2016.

On July 21, 2016, Teradata acquired Big Data Partnership, a service company based in the UK.

Active enterprise data warehouse

Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse, often called Teradata Database, includes data management tools and data mining software. Teradata's product can be used for business analysis. Data warehouses can track company data, such as sales, customer preferences, product placement, etc.

The data warehouse differentiates between “hot and cold” data – meaning that the warehouse puts data that is not often used in a slower storage section. As of October 2010, Teradata uses Xeon 5600 processors for the server nodes.

Teradata Database 13.10 was announced in 2010 as the company’s database software for storing and processing data.

Teradata Database 14 was sold as the upgrade to 13.10 in 2011 and runs multiple data warehouse workloads at the same time. It includes column-store analyses.

Teradata Integrated Analytics is a set of tools for data analysis that resides inside the data warehouse.

Teradata Warehouse Miner provides and interface for data mining on Microsoft Windows. It was released before 2003.

Aster Platform

The Aster Platform is Teradata's analytic technology, acquired from Aster Data Systems.

Backup, archive, and restore

BAR is Teradata’s backup and recovery system.

The Teradata Disaster Recovery Solution is automation and tools for data recovery and archiving. Customer data can be stored in an offsite recovery center.

QueryGrid

The Teradata database includes a feature called QueryGrid, that allows user of the Teradata database to fetch data from external databases from standard SQL queries, as if they were hosted in the local EDW. The data movement happens in parallel whenever possible, so it is as efficient as performance the external data source; this is usually still much slower than native Teradata database performance, but still acceptable for exploratory tasks. External data sources are Aster, Presto, Teradata, Hive and Oracle.

Platform family

Teradata Platform Family is a set of products that include the Teradata Data Warehouse, Database, and a set of analytic tools. The platform family is marketed as smaller and less expensive than the other Teradata products.

Big data

Teradata began to market with the term “big data” in 2010. CTO Stephen Brobst attributed the rise of big data to “new media sources, such as social media.” The increase in semi-structured and unstructured data gathered from online interactions prompted Teradata to form the “Petabyte club” in 2011 for its heaviest big data users.

The rise of big data resulted in many traditional data warehousing companies updating their products and technology. For Teradata, big data prompted the acquisition of Aster Data Systems in 2011 for the company’s MapReduce capabilities and ability to store and analyze semi-structured data.

Competition

Teradata's main competitors are similar products from vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Sybase IQ. Also, competitors include data warehouse appliance vendors such as Netezza (acquired in November 2010 by IBM), DATAllegro (acquired in August 2008 by Microsoft), ParAccel, Pivotal Greenplum Database, and Vertica Systems (acquired in February 2011 by HP), and from packaged data warehouse applications such as SAP BW and Kalido.

Teradata has also seen competition from Hadoop-based distributions and other open source technologies.