Hi everyone! This is an update to my recent blog post on the final days of the legacy data warehouse (link below).

The topic of legacy data warehouses slowly fading away struck a chord with many readers. Now we have updates from Snowflake and Teradata.

On Aug 24, the same day I published “The Final Days of the Legacy Data Warehouse,” Snowflake announced its earnings for Q2 FY2023. Not surprisingly, a question about legacy systems came up during Snowflake’s earnings call. One financial analyst asked Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman about the level of activity of customers migrating from on-premises systems to Snowflake’s data cloud.

Slootman: “In the last week, I've heard two very, very iconic names in two different industries that were staunch on-premises people, who would never ever go cloud, and that are now going [cloud]. So I just feel that the resistance is completely breaking….A lot of this is that they’re going to get left behind. You can’t take advantage of innovations that are only available on the cloud. We’re going to see acceleration out of this.”

Is he right? I have no doubt that he is.

According to Ocient, 59% of respondents to its survey are actively looking to switch data warehouse providers. They specifically named IBM, Cloudera, and Teradata as the top 3 legacy environments that data managers want to move away from.

Their reasons:

·      40% want to modernize their legacy platforms

·      42% feel their existing system isn’t comprehensive enough, and

·      36% say it’s not flexible enough

This explains why Snowflake, with its data cloud and data marketplace, has become such a tour de force. Other disruptors are Databricks, Firebolt, SingleStore, TileDB, Yellowbrick, and of course AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

I would include Ocient as well, with its hyperscale data warehouse platform, which is capable of analyzing trillions of records.

The old guard responds

Where does that leave traditional data warehouse providers—companies like IBM and Teradata? They know that their customers want newer, cloud-native platforms. And they’re taking steps to modernize their offerings.

That brings me back to Teradata, which recently made a product announcement that is relevant to this whole discussion.

Teradata is synonymous with the older data warehouses that many organizations are looking to replace. But Teradata is fighting back, as SVP Ashish Yajnik described to me in an earlier Cloud Database Report podcast conversation (link below).

Teradata’s new cloud-native architecture

Now, Teradata has just introduced VantageCloud Lake, a new and improved cloud data warehouse that is based on a cloud-native architecture. With modern capabilities like object storage in the cloud, auto scaling, and self-service in AWS, and soon to be available in other clouds.

So the decision to move to a cloud data warehouse is getting easier, but also harder in some respects.

* Easier because that’s the inevitable direction the industry is heading. For CIOs and CTOs the question is when, not if.

* Harder because incumbent vendors like Teradata are not standing by while Snowflake and Databricks pick off their installed base. They’re responding with cloud-native platforms of their own.

Who will be the next leaders in this fast-changing market? We’ll have to wait a while longer for the query results on that question.

In this episode of the Cloud Database Report Podcast, I talk with Ashish Yajnik, SVP of product management for data & analytics at Teradata, the old-school data warehouse company that is transitioning its platform and capabilities to the cloud.

I’ve been covering Teradata for more that 20 years. Here’s an article I wrote for InformationWeek in 2007 when NCR spun off Teradata as a separate company.

So I’ve been watching with interest as Teradata continues to modernize its data warehouse environment, Vantage. Many of Teradata's customers continue to manage enterprise data warehouses on premises, while transitioning to the cloud over months or years.

Yajnik is responsible for Teradata’s product transformation to the cloud, which puts him in the thick of things as the company repositions its traditional data warehouse for use in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. 

It’s worth noting that Teradata Vantage is available on all of the Big 3 public cloud platforms—AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. In our interview, Yajnik downplayed any competition with those heavy hitters, even though they call offer data warehouse platforms of their own. “We don’t see cloud service providers as competitors,” he said.

In fact, just last week Teradata announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft to integrate Teradata Vantage with Microsoft Azure. And in November, Teradata announced a three-year “strategic collaboration agreement” with AWS that includes, among other things, joint product development and integration.

Separately, Teradata has recently announced customer deals with Telefonica, Volkswagen, and Tesco. 

We will learn more about how Teradata’s strategy is playing out when the company announces its financial results for Q4 and full-year 2021 on Feb. 7.

Highlights from the Podcast

Key topics from the interview include: 

* Teradata's priorities for the year ahead

* Strategic collaboration with AWS on product development and integration of Vantage on AWS

* Expanding use of AI & ML in Teradata environments

* Customer projects, including Volkswagen for smart factories

* What Teradata is doing to enable more data sharing

* Teradata’s core strengths in this fast-changing competitive market

Quotes from the podcast: 

* "What we are embarking on is to make this whole multi-cloud journey much more intelligent and not so accidental for our customers."

* "Our customers  require a  unified architecture from both companies [Teradata and AWS] in order to modernize and build their data and analytics platform."

* "We are seeing a ton of interest in the analytics roadmaps, especially in the context of these industry data models."

* "We've seen customers go to competitors, hit a brick wall in terms of their scaling needs, and come back to Vantage."

* "Not all analytics are created equal."

Ocient is a software startup that specializes in complex analysis of the world's largest datasets. Early adopters are hyperscale web companies and enterprises that need to analyze data sets of billions or trillions of records. 

Prior to Ocient, Gladwin was the founder of object storage vendor Cleversafe, acquired by IBM in 2015. That experience with mega-size data storage  carried over to Ocient, whose software is optimized to run on NVMe solid state storage, industry standard CPUs, and 100 GB networking. 

John Foley is editor of the Cloud Database Report and senior analyst with Acceleration Economy. 

Key topics from the interview include: 

• Ocient is focused on very large datasets—petabytes, exabytes, and trillions of rows of data
• Leading uses cases include digital ad auctions, telecom network traffic, vehicle fleets
• Ocient uses a computer adjacent architecture with storage and compute in the same tier
• Ocient is available on premises, in the cloud, and as a managed service
• What’s ahead for Ocient in 2022

Quotes from the podcast: 

• "Our focus is on complex analysis of at least hundreds of billions of records, if not trillions or tens of trillions or hundreds of trillions. That's that's territory that was previously impossible."
• "Billions is kind of the last scale at which humans can actually make or touch data that big. It's very hard to do, but it's possible. But at trillions scale, it's just not possible."
• "I've challenged people to give me an example of some new technology, some new version of something that makes less data than the version it replaces."
• "5g is arguably the largest technology infrastructure investment ever. It's going to create a whole lot more data, at least 10 times the amount of data, for everything."
• "What we see is, over time, data analysis is going to occur on these hyperscale systems."