While it is only now that other IT companies are recognizing the emergence of ?Big Data?, US-based tech firm Teradata said it has long been preaching the gospel on this phenomenon by offering data warehousing and analytics solutions that address the problems posed by it.
Stephen Brobst, chief technology officer of Teradata, made this assertion during a visit to the country on Monday, March 4, in which he scoffed at the belated attempt of IT giants such as EMC and IBM to ride on the Big Data bandwagon.
Brobst said considers EMC as his company?s main competitor in the technology aspect, and IBM in the marketing side. But unlike these two firms, he said, Teradata has been into Big Data from the very start.
According to him, it was unwise for EMC to acquire a ?big data? company called Greenplum and then quickly headed to enter the Big Data race.
He said Greenplum?s main technology is based on an open source database that was merely tweaked to address big data. ?As long as I am the CTO [of Teradata], I wouldn?t allow that strategy. Over my dead body,? Brobst quipped.
As for IBM, the executive said Big Blue has weaved a marketing scheme that has packaged a number of its offerings as Big Data solutions without really understanding the matter.
Brobst, who has performed master?s and PhD research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of Barack Obama?s President?s Innovation and Technology Advisory Committee during his first term, stressed that companies ? especially in the competitive local telco industry ? to know the nature of Big Data environments.
These environments, he said, are difficult to deploy, and hard to manage with new types of data and multiple systems. Providing access to timely business insights is problematic.
This is the reason, Brobst said, why Teradata is pushing to the mainstream its solutions that were initially being used by large dotcoms such as Amazon.
He said his company recently rolled out the Teradata Unified Data Environment, which is a framework for organizations to address all types of data and multiple Teradata systems.
The platform leverages on technologies from Teradata, Teradata Aster, and open source Apache Hadoop, to ?allow business users to ask any question, against any data, with any analytic, at any time.?
He said they have also released new software, Teradata Viewpoint, Teradata Connector, and Teradata Vital Infrastructure, and new hardware – Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2700 and the recently announced Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance.
