Business analytics company Teradata announced their cloud offering Teradata Cloud, a new service that is bringing data warehouse to the cloud with a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. As part of the new offering, access to ETL, Business Intelligence and Teradata’s database is included in a monthly subscription. The new product is currently available in the United States with Europe coming up shortly and the rest of the world to follow.
Loading data into the cloud is the first part of a three part process Teradata Cloud is addressing. The other two parts consist of the discovery platform and the data management component.
From a technical standpoint, at the current stage Teradata Cloud fares closer to Amazon Redshift than any other cloud offering. Teradata offers physical dedicated hardware in its cloud, which is appealing for large corporations that can’t have their data collocated with other datasets. Teradata’s selling point for the Teradata Workload Manager is also a richer set of features as compared with Amazon’s Data Pipeline offering.
Aster Database discovery platform can be used to extract key insights from the dataset. Predefined analytics packages are available for common analytics requirements like path and pattern analysis, statistical analysis and more. On top of these packages, Teradata provides a developer library with functions for common statistics and math related tasks. Aster Database allows for parallel execution of SQL based queries using MapReduce.
Data Management is powered through Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), based on Hadoop. HDP can capture, store and refine raw data and transform it into data structures ready for consumption from both Business Analysts as well as Data Scientists and Quants.
Teradata Data Warehouse in the cloud is available right away as part of the Cloud platform. Discovery platform and Data management components will be rolled out in the first quarter of 2014. This will allow for Teradata’s Unified Data Architecture to live completely off managed SaaS cloud services.
Teradata is also offering consulting in all three key components of the platform, aiming to reduce time to market for their clients implementation needs. Consulting team is also aiming towards implementing a full solution from ground up, integrated with existing business intelligence tools and helping the business to make data driven decisions.