I recently read this from Snowflake: “Teradata served a purpose that has long since passed. The explosion of data, the data analytics needs of today’s enterprise, and modern cloud data warehouse technology have all taken a giant leap forward. #RetireTeradata”. For some reason, I could hear Aerosmith’s ‘Dream On’ playing.
Retire Teradata. Where have I heard that before? First, there was Sybase, then Informix, Redbrick, Pyramid, White Cross, Oracle, and IBM—all claimed to be better than Teradata. Then along came the next generation of “good enough” wannabes like Netezza, ParAccel, and DATAllegro. And who could forget HP Neoview—Mark Hurd was going to put his old company out of business. Then came the AWS Redshift and the Hadoop craze. Teradata was doomed!
All these alternatives dreamed of replacing Teradata, but none of them could. That’s right—despite hundreds of millions spent on R&D and outlandish marketing claims, none replaced a single Teradata system of any significance. Most of these dreamers aren’t even around anymore. Now Snowflake is saying Teradata served a purpose that has long since passed. Here we go again. Snowflake is claiming to be replacing Teradata systems. Their marketing group gets a B- for boldness and an F for integrity.
When we talk about analytics at scale, let me paint a picture for you based on real Teradata customer implementations. Multiple petabytes of cross-functional integrated data serving hundreds of applications. Not just sitting idle in a passive data lake, but being constantly updated and queried by tens of thousands of users. Many applications are customer facing with stringent operational SLAs. These systems run 7x24x365, and require 99.99 percent availability; so no, Snowflake, they can’t shut them down when idle to save a few dollars. Many of our customers run millions of queries a day—try charging them by the query. When Teradata says analytics at scale, you get the picture.
Many Teradata systems drive business returns over a billion dollars. Yes, you read that right. Documented business cases where Teradata has driven billion-dollar business benefits for the most innovative companies in the world. I seriously doubt these companies think our time has passed.
Our innovative design and MPP architecture has evolved and continues to be the gold standard for on-premises and cloud analytics. Maybe Gartner didn’t get your memo that our time has passed since they recently ranked us #1 in Logical Data Warehouse, #1 in Real-time Data Warehouse, and #1 in Traditional Data Warehouse (Gartner Critical Capabilities). Our innovative Teradata Analytics Platform incorporates new data types, analytic engines, data science workbenches, and modern languages—and we continue to take giant leaps forward.
Our marketing is fact-based, and we take pride in being recognized for our ethics and integrity. You may spin up a data mart for a department, but you’re not replacing our customers. It’s disingenuous to make false claims—maybe you should change your name to Snowfake.
Until you have reference customers at scale—and prove you can make a profit—you should stay in your lower left corner of the market and focus on smaller companies who don’t have enterprise-level requirements. And if you need a corporate spokesperson, Steven Tyler may be a good choice.
#CloudExperts #BuiltForTheCloud
