Teradata


Teradata Corporation is a provider of database and analytics-related software, products, and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech and Citibank's advanced technology group.

Overview

Teradata is an enterprise software company that develops and sells database analytics software subscriptions. The company provides three main services: business analytics, cloud products, and consulting. It operates in North and Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Teradata is headquartered in San Diego, California, and has additional major U.S. locations in Atlanta and San Francisco, where its data center research and development is housed. It is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock symbol TDC. Victor Lund has served as the company's president and chief executive officer since 2016. The company reported $2.3 billion in revenue, with a net income of $112 million, and 12,026 employees globally, as of March 7, 2019.

History

The concept of Teradata grew from research at California Institute of Technology and from the discussions of Citibank's advanced technology group in the 1970s. In 1979, the company was incorporated in Brentwood, California by Jack E. Shemer, Philip M. Neches, Walter E. Muir, Jerold R. Modes, William P. Worth, Carroll Reed and David Hartke. Teradata released its DBC/1012 specialized database computer in 1984. In 1990, the company acquired Sharebase, originally named Britton Lee. In September 1991, AT&T Corporation acquired NCR Corporation, which announced the acquisition of Teradata for about $250 million in December. Teradata built the first system, over 1 terabyte, for Wal-Mart in 1992.
NCR acquired Strategic Technologies & Systems in 1999, and appointed Stephen Brobst as chief technology officer of Teradata Solutions Group. In 2000, NCR acquired Ceres Integrated Solutions and its customer relationship management software for $90 million, as well as Stirling Douglas Group and its demand chain management software. Teradata acquired financial management software from DecisionPoint in 2005. In January 2007, NCR announced Teradata would become an independent public company, led by Michael F. Koehler. The new company's shares started trading in October.
In April 2016, a product line called IntelliFlex was announced. Victor L. Lund became the chief executive on May 5, 2016.
On May 7, 2020, Teradata announced the appointment of Steve McMillan as president and chief executive officer, effective June 8, 2020

Acquisitions and divestitures

Teradata has acquired several companies since becoming an independent public company in 2008. In March 2008, Teradata acquired professional services company Claraview, which previously had spun out software provider Clarabridge. Teradata acquired column-oriented DBMS vendor Kickfire in August 2010, followed by the marketing software company Aprimo for about $550 million in December. In March 2011, the company acquired Aster Data Systems for about $263 million. Teradata acquired email direct marketing company eCircle in May 2012, which was merged into the Aprimo business.
In 2014, Teradata acquired the assets of Revelytix, a provider of information management products and for a reported $50 million. In September, Teradata acquired Hadoop service firm Think Big Analytics. In December, Teradata acquired RainStor, a company specializing in online data archiving on Hadoop. Teradata acquired Appoxxee, a mobile marketing software as a service provider, for about $20 million in January 2015, followed by the Netherlands-based digital marketing company FLXone in September.
In July 2016, the marketing applications division, using the Aprimo brand, was sold to private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners for about $90 million with Aprimo under CEO John Stammen moving its headquarters to Chicago. whilst absorbing Revenew Inc. that had also been bought by Marlin.
Teradata acquired Big Data Partnership, a service company based in the UK, on July 21, 2016. In July 2017, Teradata acquired StackIQ, maker of the Stacki software.

Technology and products

Teradata offers three main services to its customers: cloud and hardware-based data warehousing, business analytics, and consulting services. In September 2016, the company launched Teradata Everywhere, which allows users to submit queries against public and private databases. The service uses massively parallel processing across both its physical data warehouse and cloud storage, including managed environments such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMware, and Teradata's Managed Cloud and IntelliFlex. Teradata offers customers both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud storage. In March 2017, Teradata introduced Teradata IntelliCloud, a secure managed cloud for data and analytic software as a service. IntelliCloud is compatible with Teradata's data warehouse platform, IntelliFlex. The Teradata Analytics Platform was unveiled in 2017.
Teradata Vantage
Teradata Vantage, their pervasive data intelligence platform, deploys on-premises, to the cloud, or as a hybrid model. Vantage consists of various analytics engines on a core relational database, including its MPP engine, the Aster graph database, and a machine learning engine. Spark and TensorFlow engines are slated to be added. The idea is to let users access and analyze all their data without having to learn a new tool or language, or worry about where data is located.
On top of these engines, Teradata will build support for a variety of languages, including SQL, R, and Python, with Scala, Go, and JavaScript in the works. It will also support analytic tools, including its own offerings as well as Jupyter, R Studio, and SAS, with support for Dataiku and KNIME. Special accommodations are being made for handling special data types, such as time-series, temporal data, and geo-spatial analytics, as well.
Vantage provides access to descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics to enable autonomous decision making. Vantage also has machine learning and visualization functions which can be deployed across public clouds, on-premises, and commodity infrastructure. Vantage provides storage and analysis for multi-structured data, including JSON, BSON, AVRO, CSV and XML formats.

Big data

Teradata began to market with the term "big data" in 2010. CTO Stephen Brobst attributed the rise of big data to "new media sources, such as social media." The increase in semi-structured and unstructured data gathered from online interactions prompted Teradata to form the "Petabyte club" in 2011 for its heaviest big data users.
The rise of big data resulted in many traditional data warehousing companies updating their products and technology. For Teradata, big data prompted the acquisition of Aster Data Systems in 2011 for the company's MapReduce capabilities and ability to store and analyze semi-structured data.