Data warehouse specialist Teradata is ramping up its Hadoop business again, announcing the company’s Hadoop cloud service as well as a new, tight partnership with Cloudera on Thursday.
For a couple of years, analysts have been claiming — and Teradata has been disputing — that the open source Hadoop platform and its expanding set of capabilities could pose a risk to Teradata’s multibillion-dollar business of selling expensive, proprietary database software and appliances. Whether or not [company]Teradata[/company] is actually worried, it’s doing everything it can to embrace Hadoop and roll it into the Teradata sales cycle.
The [company]Cloudera[/company] partnership is probably the biggest of Teradata’s latest moves, as it loosens, to some degree, a very tight partnership Teradata already has in place with Cloudera rival Hortonworks. (Among other work they’ve done together, Teradata’s own Hadoop appliances actually run the [company]Hortonworks[/company] Data Platform software.) Under the new agreement, Teradata has developed new connectors to bring Cloudera’s Hadoop software under the control of Teradata’s tools for querying and managing multiple data stores, and will also be reselling Cloudera software and services.
Teradata and Cloudera have long integrated with each other’s technologies at some level, despite a clear competition for certain classes of corporate data. In 2013, then-Cloudera-CEO and present Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olson told me that although nobody is replacing their Teradata systems, its revenues would likely fall as customers opted to store more data in Hadoop and reserve Teradata for only the most-important stuff.
“It is true to say folks are looking at what they’re running on Teradata and rationalizing those decisions,” Olson said. “[They’re trying to] concentrate first-class spend on a first-class workload.”
Teradata also announced on Thursday a new service that will users run Hadoop jobs in the cloud, on infrastructure managed by Teradata. That service, which will be available in the fourth quarter of this year, complements a cloud service for its flagship analytics software that Teradata first announced a year ago.
But the Cloudera deal and cloud service are just the latest thumps in what has been a steadily accelerating drumbeat of Hadoop support within Teradata. In July, the company acquired the assets of early SQL-on-Hadoop startup Hadapt, and in September it acquired Think Big Analytics, a consulting and services firm that specialized in Hadoop and other open source big-data technologies. As more of its customers want to deploy Hadoop, and as Teradata itself sells more Hadoop products, it needs that expertise to service those customers and also inform its product roadmap.
