Teradata Eyes Rivals in Data Warehouse Space with New Appliance

Teradata is a leader in a crowded data warehousing market, where it faces competition from vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Netezza and others. At Teradata's Partner User Group Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, the company is showcasing data warehouse technologies officials hope will give it an edge among its competitors.

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The data warehousing market has been very busy of late, between the marketing push around the HP Oracle Database Machine and Microsoft's acquisition of DATAllegro. In the middle of all this sits Teradata, a longtime leader in data warehousing.

At its Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo in Las Vegas this week, Teradata is touting a new appliance, a new version of its database and plans to use solid state disk drives in data warehousing environments. All this, company officials contend, will help Teradata keeps its position in the high-end data warehousing market secure as rivals make pushes of their own.

"With all the digitization of the world, there are extremely large data volumes out there I think go unserved largely by the general data warehouse market technology vendors," said Scott Gnau, chief development officer at Teradata, in an interview with eWEEK. "This new addition to our family [the Teradata Extreme Data Appliance 1550] will allow us to fit into a really great spot for our customers."

The new appliance supports 50 petabytes of data at a price-point of $16,500 per terabyte. According to Teradata, the Extreme Data Appliance is a purpose-built analytical platform positioned for a small group of users who have specialized analytics typically within a department. It enables those users to perform analysis on massive volumes of data, such as Web site clickstream, RFID product movement and cell phone network usage.

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The announcement comes less than a month after Oracle began pushing its HP Oracle Database Machine appliance at its OpenWorld conference. In interviews with eWEEK, Oracle officials took aim specifically at Teradata and Netezza, contending Oracle would best competitors by offering a combination of storage and speed at a cheaper price.

"If Teradata sat back and did nothing, it would eventually erode their business and cause them major issues," said Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg. "However, the 2550, 5550, 550 and 1550 are all advances that allow Teradata to compete better than ever before. They continue to make major strides forward and are now going further with the Extreme Data Appliance."