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>> Narrator: From around the globe.
It's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020.
Sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners.
>> Hi, welcome to theCUBE virtual.
You're watching our coverage or AWS re:Invent 2020.
We are theCUBE virtual and I'm your host, Keith Townsend.
Today, I'm joined with Steve McMillan,
CEO, president of Teradata.
Steve, welcome to the show.
>> Hey Keith, great to be here today, glad to be joining you.
>> So Teradata, this is a big exciting market analytics
in the public cloud, but let's start with a little history.
I remember Teradata as being the thing that I do
as a dataset set, my big data on premises
and asking questions of Teradata,
how's the public cloud changed Teradata's business?
>> I think Teradata has got a fantastic heritage.
With, you know, being in the cloud,
the data analytics business now for over 40 years.
So, in fact, you could say that Teradata
invented data analytics.
The cloud for us is just a really exciting opportunity.
It gives our customers another deployment option.
And we are looking at how we can take our capabilities
from on-prem and extend those into the cloud.
And that's really what a lot of Teradata's
existing customers are looking for.
But we also see tremendous opportunity.
As customers are responding to their market
and their environments they want to use the cloud
as a platform an agile platform,
and we're finding that they can see the benefits of using
Teradata in terms of performance and scale.
And given a level of insight into the data that they've got
in the cloud, that other platforms can touch.
>> So we're talking about real time, current issues
that's going on in customer environments.
Talk to me about, kind of the topic de jure, the pandemic.
How's the pandemic impacting your customer environments
or market, the need for this type of analytics capabilities?
>> I think the pandemic has just been an accelerant
for a lot of transformation for companies.
And you know, that the situation with COVID-19 globally,
has really resulted in a need for companies to be able
to respond very agilely to an uncertain environment.
And an environment That's changing all of the time.
You know, AWS as a cloud provider
can provide that level of agility.
What Teradata does sitting on top of AWS
is provide a level of business insight,
that enables companies to use their data,
to dynamically respond to the situations
that are in front of them today.
Even as that changes day by day or hour by hour
or minute to minute.
>> So I've talked to a lot of customer.
We have looked at the public cloud as a way to respond,
accelerate their businesses in the era of the pandemic.
But let's talk about long term vision.
How are customers going to use Teradata
moving forward in a post pandemic world?
>> Okay I think that just from a data strategy perspective,
cloud is one aspect of it.
Really what our customers want to get from the data,
is real insights, that help them transform
how their businesses work.
Especially in these changing times.
So, businesses we find are overwhelmed by the amount of data
that they've got.
There's never a day in the world where there's less data
than there was the day before.
And coping with that explosion of data,
getting real insights so they can work out
what you're going to do, that is we believe forms
the basis of a long term data strategy.
>> So help me paint a picture for customers
as they look at their multicloud
or hybrid cloud environments, which, you know,
I have my systems of record on premises still.
I have my next generation customer facing applications
in the public cloud.
I have all this transactional customer experience data.
How does Teradata help bridge those worlds?
>> That's where I think Teradata is uniquely placed.
You know, we bring that 40 years of heritage and investment
and data analytics,
and we help our customers take that into the cloud.
We see most of our customers now have a cloud strategy.
I was reading an industry report the other day
that said that, on average, organizations will have
seven clouds that they have to deal with.
Many customers are deploying on AWS,
because they see it as a great cloud platform,
where they can extend their on-prem data capabilities
into the cloud, use the facilities and features of AWS,
combined with Teradata to really transform the data fabric
and the analytics capabilities of their organization.
So it's really that combination,
that is provide some unique opportunities for our customers.
And again, like using Teradata and AWS cloud,
provides unprecedented skill.
A skill that we've been able to develop in our technology
over the last few decades.
And we take that know-how and deploy it in the Amazon cloud,
so that customers have a great degree of control.
They can automize how their queries
run inside the environment.
They can get degrees of cost certainty
that they don't otherwise have.
They can govern their data in ways that gives them
complete control and security over the analytics,
the insights that they make available
so that they can really change how their companies operate.
>> So, obviously, you run a sizable business,
a mature business,
that's finding this incredible growth mechanism.
But, at the end of the day, when your employees come to you
with a new idea, you want to know what's the return
on investment, you know money isn't free,
resources, aren't free.
You have limited staff, just like everyone else.
Talk to me about the return on investment from Teradata.
>> So I think Teradata really offers the ability to get
that cost per query and the sweet spot for our customers.
So we've done a number of things
we've made a cost calculator available on our website.
So that, our customers can look at and compare
how much it costs to run inside a Teradata environment
or in an AWS cloud and how that compares
to all of the other options that may be available to them.
And what we see is often an order of magnitude difference
in terms of the cost profile for running Teradata,
and getting true business level insights,
from the data that they have,
compared to some of the competitive solutions out there.
And that might really surprise some of your viewers, Keith,
in terms of that, that's not usually
what you'd associate Teradata with.
What you associate Teradata with is, an absolutely
robust system that's completely meshing critical.
But data, we get those features
in a really controlled environment,
where the cost per query is optimized.
We've got consumption-based pricing models that enables
that return on investment curve that you're talking about
to be achieved really early on in the process
of using our technologies.
>> So I've been part of these big, massive projects
within enterprises, where we look at these,
whether it's data leaks,
unstructured data etc.
We want to ask big questions of them.
The big problem with that has always been cost overruns.
These projects always, always, in my experience,
go over budget.
How does the combination of AWS,
which has the potential to have unlimited budget,
and Teradata, which solves basically unlimited
budget issue, addresses unlimited budget problem,
how do you help control that risk and avoid cost overrun?
>> Yeah, so, you know, working in an environment like AWS,
which is completely elastic,
really does give tremendous value
to our conveying customer set.
But as you said, that elasticity comes at a cost.
So, in order to make sure that our customers run the most
important queries that they get the most value from,
we utilize technologies that we've taken
from our on-prem deployments.
Things like query optimization and workload management.
And that lets us give our customers a degree of control,
in that environment that they wouldn't otherwise have.
So we're really excited about the future
of Teradata and the AWS cloud.
>> Now we've spent a lot of time talking about the AWS cloud,
but a lot of customers simply aren't there.
A lot of them are just reacting to the pandemic,
as a need for today.
Do I have to be all in, in AWS and public cloud in general
to take advantage of all of these capabilities?
>> What we want to do from a Teradata Vantage perspective
is really promote it as a platform.
And a platform that can be used
across all of the cloud environments,
and into the on-prem environment.
If you have Teradata Vantage deployed in your on-prem etc.
So we're all about opening up choice and flexibility.
You know, the Teradata technology really enables
our customers, not just to have a data mart view of things
where, you know, you're pulling out simple queries on,
you know, the rear view mirror of what happened.
But, the analytics technology lets you get into questions
like, well, why did that event happen?
What's going to happen next?
And what should we do to proactively plan that, you know?
We see use cases like the internet of things,
where, there's a preventative and predictive maintenance
on loss at the bases out there.
And you can imagine the amount and volume of data
that's getting consumed.
And we analyze that data real time, give real answers
to make recommendations to really enable an organization
that's servicing these machines.
The the right level of insight to optimize
how they're working on a day-to-day business.
It's really exciting.
>> So, again, we're now shifting the conversation
back over to public cloud, in consumption.
How do I consume, Teradata Vantage in AWS?
>> We've got a number of different deployment models
in terms of consuming Teradata Vantage.
So you can have a pay as you go model.
Which means, you can start at nothing
and work up over time.
Our consumption model is really unique because we actually,
we bill on the basis of what we call logical IO.
Which means that it's only when queries work
inside the environment that a customer gets billed for it.
So you don't just get charged by walking into the room
and having the light switched on.
You only get charged when that light is doing
something meaningful, for you and your organization,
and actually result in an insight for you as a company.
All's like a blended pricing model.
So you can work out what the optimum deployment model
is for Teradata Vantage and say the cloud.
So lots of choice, we're all about giving that flexibility
and choice in terms of how we operate.
>> So you hit on the topic of IOT.
But let's hit that dead on and talk about another hot part
of, not just the IT conversation, but the cloud conversation
and especially data analytics, the edge.
How does a solution like Vantage play with datasets
that live at the edge and have to be carried at the edge?
>> You know, one of the great things of a Teradata Vantage
and how we're looking at it just now.
If we think about, or you may recall as Teradata,
the desire was to try and get everything into a Teradata
and have all the data captured, in say that ecosystem.
That doesn't work as well in the cloud world.
What we're all about is opening up that platform.
So some of your viewers might be surprised.
We now integrate with 18 of the AWS services
to really start opening the platform up.
We give access to from Teradata into native object stores
and cloud environments so that,
customers don't have to duplicate data.
They don't have to copy it into Teradata,
and have that data logged in there.
We can access a whole plethora of data capture mechanisms
that the cloud providers, AWS make available.
In terms of those APIs and those calls.
So that we can integrate it all together,
and give the best possible set of data sources
for Teradata Vantage to work on.
So, really exciting time in terms of opening up
that platform being really modern in terms of looking at
the data fabric, that our customers have
and how they're using these cloud services
on a day-to-day basis.
And integrating that with the power of Vantage.
>> Steve McMillan, president CEO of Teradata.
We really appreciate it.
40 years of analytics history.
We're seeing the movement in public cloud
where we're going from these companies
that we put all our data into centralized,
adapting to the reality of edge data center, public cloud.
Meeting us where the data's at.
We're super excited to now, promote you into an alumn
of theCUBE.
Make sure to join us for additional coverage
of AWS re:Invent 2020,
on theCUBE.
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