Source: risnews.com. Original announcement made at Teradata Universe 2019, Denver Convention Center.
At its annual user conference, Teradata Universe 2019, held at the Denver Convention Center, Teradata unveiled a series of significant product and partnership announcements centered on its flagship analytics platform, Teradata Vantage. The headline announcement was a major partnership with Google Cloud, bringing Vantage to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and completing Teradata’s presence across all three major public cloud providers.
Teradata Vantage Comes to Google Cloud Platform
Teradata confirmed that Vantage will be made available on Google Cloud Platform, extending its existing cloud deployments beyond AWS and Microsoft Azure. With this partnership, Teradata now offers its enterprise analytics environment across all three leading public clouds, giving customers the ability to run Vantage in whichever cloud environment their organization has standardized on.
Under the partnership model, Teradata manages the performance, security, availability, and operations of the Vantage analytics environment, while leveraging GCP’s underlying compute and storage infrastructure. This means enterprise customers retain the managed-service experience they expect from Teradata while benefiting from Google Cloud’s global infrastructure.
“Adding Google Cloud Platform to the global footprint already offered by Teradata will provide customers with unrivaled choice and flexibility with how and where they use Teradata Vantage. Plus, with native support for low-cost storage, organizations will be able to access and query all of their data, regardless of where it is, to get an unrivaled view of virtually every aspect of their business.”
— Ashish Yajnik, VP of Product Management, Teradata
“Teradata customers want to get as much value out of their data as possible, so we are delighted to partner with Teradata to connect them to Google Cloud to reduce infrastructure costs, enhance cloud security, and scale seamlessly. Google and Teradata will work together to tightly integrate Google Cloud services like AI and Google Cloud Storage into Vantage to bring advanced capabilities to our joint customers.”
— Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President, Global Ecosystem, Google Cloud
The partnership also includes plans to integrate Google Cloud AI services and Google Cloud Storage natively into the Vantage platform. Teradata Vantage on GCP was planned for general availability in 2020, with a private preview available to select customers in the first half of 2020 upon request.
All Announcements at Teradata Universe 2019
The Google Cloud partnership was the most prominent of several announcements made at the five-day conference. Here is a summary of every major item announced:
- Teradata Vantage on Google Cloud Platform
- Native support for low-cost object storage
- Pay-as-you-go (consumption) pricing for Vantage
- Hadoop Migration Program
- Debut of Vantage Analyst
- Debut of Vantage Customer Experience (CX)
Native Support for Low-Cost Object Storage
A recurring theme across the announcements was enabling customers to query all their data, regardless of where it lives. Teradata announced native support for low-cost object stores, initially targeting Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage, with Google Cloud Storage planned as part of the new GCP partnership.
Object stores are commonly used to capture and retain raw data at full fidelity from a wide range of sources — equipment sensors, web clickstreams, customer service call recordings, social media feeds, and more. By giving Vantage native query access to these stores, Teradata allows organizations to analyze data in place without expensive ETL pipelines or data duplication.
Native access to low-cost object stores was in private preview at the time of the conference announcement, with general availability planned for the first half of 2020.
Consumption (Pay-As-You-Go) Pricing
Teradata introduced a new consumption pricing model for Vantage that charges customers only for the compute resources they actually use — billed down to the millisecond — with no upfront commitment required. This is a significant shift from traditional capacity-based licensing, which requires organizations to forecast workloads and commit to resources in advance.
By moving to consumption pricing, Teradata transfers deployment risk from the customer to itself, and aligns costs directly to business value. For enterprises managing unpredictable or seasonal analytics workloads, this model offers both financial and operational flexibility.
Consumption pricing for Vantage was in limited availability at the time of announcement, with general availability planned for the first half of 2020.
Hadoop Migration Program
Many enterprises made substantial investments in Hadoop-based data architectures over the past decade. However, the industry has broadly shifted toward architectures that separate compute from storage, using cloud object stores rather than HDFS. This transition has left many organizations with legacy Hadoop environments that are costly to operate and difficult to evolve.
Teradata’s Hadoop Migration Program offers professional services and migration expertise to help customers transition their analytics ecosystems from Hadoop to cloud-native architectures, with Vantage as the analytics layer and inexpensive cloud object storage replacing HDFS. The program aims to reduce migration risk while lowering total cost of ownership.
Hadoop migration services were announced as globally available at the time of the conference. Pricing is tailored to each customer’s specific environment and requirements.
Vantage Customer Experience (CX)
Vantage Customer Experience is a new application layer built on top of the Vantage platform, designed for marketing and customer experience professionals who need to deliver personalized, real-time customer interactions without managing underlying IT infrastructure.
“Vantage Customer Experience provides marketing and CX professionals with a best-in-class, tailored experience. Using Vantage as an enterprise customer data platform, ensures they have the autonomy and ease-of-use they need to integrate, analyze and activate customer data.”
— Reema Poddar, Chief Product Officer, Teradata
Key capabilities of Vantage CX include:
- Unify Customer Data: Built for citizen data integrators, Vantage CX provides agility to experiment with rapidly changing data while maintaining enterprise-grade governance, scale, and security.
- Turn Data into Insight: No coding required. Marketers can access advanced analytics including Path analysis for understanding customer journeys, Text analytics for sentiment analysis, Cluster analysis for hyper-segmentation, and machine learning for next-best-offer optimization.
- Turn Insights into Action: Customers can be targeted directly from visualizations. Teradata’s existing Customer Interaction Management (CIM) and Real-Time Interaction Manager (RTIM) capabilities have been modernized for cloud deployment and unified into a single integrated application.
Vantage Customer Experience was announced in limited availability, with general commercial availability planned for Q1 2020.
Vantage Analyst
Vantage Analyst is a cloud-based, no-code analytics tool aimed at business analysts who need self-service access to data science capabilities without writing code. It provides a guided environment for data loading, exploratory analysis, machine learning, and hypothesis testing across multiple data sources and types.
“Business analysts lack the tools needed for self-service data loading, discovery, machine learning and other advanced analytics. Teradata now offers Vantage Analyst in the cloud to make it simple to perform guided data science analytics without having to write a single line of code.”
— Reema Poddar, Chief Product Officer, Teradata
Vantage Analyst also surfaces hidden associations and patterns in data through visualization, helping business analysts identify actionable opportunities without requiring data engineering support. By enabling rapid iteration and hypothesis testing, the tool is designed to increase the proportion of an analyst’s time spent generating business insight rather than wrangling data.
What This Means for Enterprise Analytics Teams
Taken together, the Teradata Universe 2019 announcements represent a clear strategic direction: making Vantage cloud-agnostic, accessible to non-technical users, and financially flexible. The Google Cloud partnership in particular signals that Teradata is serious about competing in multi-cloud enterprise environments where cloud vendor lock-in is an increasing concern.
For DevOps and data engineering teams, the most operationally relevant items are the native object store support — which reduces the need for custom data movement pipelines — and the Hadoop Migration Program, which offers a structured path away from aging on-premises Hadoop clusters. The consumption pricing model is also worth evaluating for teams running variable or bursty analytics workloads where reserved capacity pricing is wasteful.