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.
