In-Depth

Teradata Ships Next-Gen Data Warehouse

Warehouse 8.0 means that Teradata is still the vendor to beat in the high-end data warehousing space.

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 02/16/2005

Last October, NCR Corp. subsidiary Teradata announced the availability of Teradata Warehouse 8.0, the next version of its flagship data-warehousing platform (see http://www.esj.com/Business_Intelligence/article.aspx?EditorialsID=7250).

Earlier this month, Teradata formally began shipping Warehouse 8.0—a few months late, but otherwise feature-complete.

In addition to the bread-and-butter analytic power that has helped make Teradata the foremost purveyor of data-warehousing solutions for decision support and high-end data-warehousing requirements, Teradata Warehouse 8.0 now includes much of the plumbing—including support for event-specific database triggers—needed to support service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Elsewhere, version 8 also ships with the new Teradata Replication Services (TRS), an offering based on technology Teradata licenses from GoldenGate Software. TRS lets organizations capture database changes in real time and replicate them to additional database instances to ensure high availability.

To mark this month’s announcement, Teradata corralled the support of a raft of business intelligence industry heavyweights, including Ab Initio, Ambeo, Ascential, Business Objects, Cognos, Evolutionary Technologies, Hyperion, Informatica, KXEN, MicroStrategy, SAS, and Siebel.

Nevertheless, Teradata is delivering Warehouse 8.0 several months later than first expected, notes Mike Schiff, a senior analyst with consultancy Current Analysis. “When Teradata first announced Teradata Warehouse 8.0 in October, it mentioned that it would be available in December 2004. It appears that Teradata has slightly missed its target date,” writes Schiff.

What’s more, says Schiff, the timing of this month’s announcement—which was released at 11:30 AM on Friday, February 4th—“is almost guaranteed to minimize ‘paper’ press coverage and associated publicity.”

Teradata officials did not respond to our request for comment.

Warehouse 8.0 is an important release for Teradata, says Schiff, who points out that the company no longer has a monopoly on the high end of the data warehousing space. “[O]ther database vendors have continued to improve their offerings and their overall scalability in terms of data volumes, query response time, and number of users supported,” he points out, stressing that “the company continues to gain new converts.”

That being said, Schiff concludes, Teradata remains “the vendor to beat” in the high-end data warehousing market. For starters, Teradata is one of NCR’s strongest performing divisions, with 12 consecutive profitable quarters. With data warehousing revenue of over $1.2 billion, Teradata in 2003 accounted for 22 percent of NCR’s total revenue. In addition, Schiff points to Teradata’s accomplished professional-services arm, which is staffed by approximately 1,400 people, each with an average of 10 years of experience.