September 2009 Archives

Randy Lea, Vice President Teradata Product & Services Marketing overcame canceled airplanes and a 4AM rescheduled flight to arrive in Boulder for the meeting this morning. We really appreciated his effort to make the meeting in person. The meeting started with a great discussion about how hard it is on consumers to figure out how to compare the appliance vendors in the space. Attempting to do apple to apple comparisons is nearly impossible. Cutting through the marketing hype is too difficult for the average consumer.

Interesting point made this morning about the cost per Terabyte marketing model in the appliance space. The early pioneers in the space went to market with solutions that delivered the box and drive space that used about a quarter of the available space of the machine with the vacant headroom they had the ability to provide high performance but as the customer grew into the solution they added more data to the solution eliminating the headroom and while dropping the performance of the box. The upside was that the overall cost per Terabyte went down but is that what the customer really needs? Do I care if my cost per Terabyte is lower if the solution is slower?

So whats the better measure? Price per user, price per query, or price per application? Isn't this really the better way to serve customers? The DW appliance strategy for Teradata is reaping the planned reward with 65% of appliance sales in new accounts 25% to existing clients opening new growth horizons for the company. Some in the market have accused Teradata of using the appliance family as a "bait and switch" tactic to get people to purchase the Teradata EDW solution but its clear this is not the case .

The solutions in the Teradata lineup include the Data Warehouse Appliance, Data Mart Appliance and Extreme Data Appliance in conjunction with Teradata's Active Enterprise Data Warehouse included in the lineup is the ability for all of them to communicate and support one another. The integrated line up really positions Teradata as an end to end solution provider.

We were also briefed today on upcoming announcements and changes to the solutions but you will have to wait for Teradata to share those details when the time is right. My take away from the meeting is Teradata is on solid ground, maintaining its rolls royce image while finding ways to help a greater customer base. The product line up makes good sense and positions them to help most anyone with DW and analytics needs. Perhaps the challenge that still exists it overcoming the public perception that your company can't afford Teradata the answer is .....yes you can.

Pankaj Agrawal CEO and Founder and Ajey Nanchahal of Compact Solutions are here in Boulder this morning. The company was founded in 2002, is privately held with headquarters in Illinois and several offices around the world. Consulting services for Compact include Architecture and design, COE and best practices, Performance optimization, Platform optimization. The solution development areas include Data Warehouse without database (C.CFF), Dashboards using BI tools, ETL migrations and upgrades (C.DIMC) and  EDW/ODS implementations using standard ETL tools.

Compact delivers solutions using a 6D Methodology details are below -




















Compact focuses on the Center of Excellence model and feels their expertise in that area sets them apart from the competition.They combine their domain knowledge and products to help clients. Pankaj applies his years of experience with Knightsbridge Consulting (now HP Professional Services) to the approach and services for Compact Solutions.

The ETL Migration tool that Compact offers is very interesting for its ability to help companies switch from one to another with a greatly reduced work load and time savings. The some clients have up to 200k+of code to convert when they want to make this architecture change. I'm not in love with the name of the product C.DIMC.

The P.DID Portable Data Integration Designer is Compacts answer to ETL design between platforms.

Because I know many people will want more information on the Data Warehouse without database (C.CFF) here is the explanation of the service from Compact.

This Compressed Flat File solution allows an organization to migrate legacy applications and data from expensive mainframes to efficient and cost effective open systems servers (Unix, Oracle etc). In addition to cost and flexibility wins, this will feed enterprise reporting to provide analysts and decision makers a competitive advantage.

The data warehouse without a database C.CFF Compact Compressed Flat File technology is an interesting way to get data in position to query. The basis for their approach is to serve certain applications that will work well with the flat file information. Compact acknowledges that the need for a standard EDW is still there for most companies but the flat file approach can save a ton of time and money to serve specific analysis needs and to serve specific applications. In my mind its a bit like a standard data mart but based on flat file analysis.

Overall I really liked the presentation today it ignited vigorous debate and excellent questions from the group. Compact Solutions offers a wide array of expertise, services and tools driven programs that will help them differentiate in the space.