Big Surprise: a Bavarian in Washington D.C. – in October?

You might ask yourself why a guy from Munich, Bavaria, travels to the USA particularly in October, when apparently people from the world over come to his hometown Munich to celebrate the famous Oktoberfest. Well, that's an easy one to answer: First, unlike the name would indicate, only a smaller part of Oktoberfest is actually taking place in that very month, and this year's "Wies'n" is already history. And, second, there really is one thing that - at least for me and almost 4,000 other Data Analytics Aficionados - can top the largest public fair of the world: Teradata PARTNERS Conference is the biggest event when it comes to data warehousing, business analytics, marketing applications and the like. We have seen some great announcements over the past couple of days.

It already started on October 17^th, when Teradata Aster announced the new Big Analytics Appliance. This appliance makes big data sets stored in Hadoop or MapReduce even more easily accessible for all kinds of users and is the logical step towards better big data analytics following the development of technologies such as SQL-MapReduce and SQL-H. Krish Krishnan of BeyeNetwork sees the appliance “(…) as a perfect combination of power and ruggedness with a lot of finesse and it differs from competitive announcements on these grounds.” Curt Monash, says when “(…) going to roll out your own Hadoop cluster, Teradata’s design choices might be a good starting point (…).”

With a big bang like this before the actual start of the conference, some may have asked what more there is to come. Rest assured we haven’t played all our cards yet:

While everything is bigger in the US, big data is a big deal everywhere around the globe and organizations are still searching for ways to deal with it. As Merv Adrian, research vice president at Gartner told us with regards to the new Big Analytics Appliance, most of the clients say that the combination of scored and processed outside data, as in Hadoop, with data inside the relational databases, brings the real added value.

Having said that, the integration of all the data an organization has at its disposal remains the ultimate goal for Teradata. And there is some news we announced this Monday that will take our customers closer towards this goal:

• Teradata Unified Data Environment leverages all the complementary benefits from Teradata, Aster and Hadoop, providing organizations the ability to access all their data in one framework with one interface. Companies can store their data in Hadoop, analyze it with Teradata Aster and make it accessible to everyone in the organization with the Teradata Database.

• Teradata Unity 14 is the first integrated product portfolio in the industry, automating the tasks that are needed to manage a multi-system environment. It enables the multiple components to work seamlessly together. Managing a whole Teradata Analytical Ecosystem is thus not going to be much more effort than managing a single system environment.

• Analytical Architecture Services allow for a significantly accelerated deployment of an integrated data environment including Teradata, Teradata Aster and Hadoop.

• More Database Innovations like workload management features, the Teradata Data Lab with Smart Loader, Teradata Studio and the Teradata Virtual Machine Edition aim to make database management easier and provide fast and easy access to advanced analytics for even more users.

All these innovations are designed to ultimately better integrate the ever-growing amounts of data, ensuring that bigger data leads to better analytics. And I don’t even have the space to name all of them in this post: please go to the Teradata PARTNERS Newsroom for a complete overview of Teradata’s innovations presented at this year’s Partners conference. However, the news won’t stop with the press conference on Monday – there’s even more to come during the second half of the conference. Stay tuned, you’re living in big times!

Hermann Wimmer