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March 4, 2014

Report Names Teradata a Leader in Big Data Hadoop Solutions

DAYTON, OhioMarch 4 — Teradata Corp., the analytic data platforms, applications and services company, announced today that Forrester Research, Inc. has positioned Teradata as a leader in its February 2014report, “The Forrester Wave: Big Data Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2014” by Mike Gualtieri and Noel Yuhanna. The report appears as big data has become an important business technology investment.

A distinguishing criterion for the vendors selected in the report was that they must offer a stand-alone solution for Hadoop: “the vendor must offer a self-sufficient, general-purpose Hadoop solution that can stand alone.” In addition, Forrester interviewed vendor customers.

Regarding Teradata’s big data Hadoop solution, Forrester wrote: “Teradata aims to offer the best Hadoop appliance. Leveraging its expertise in enterprise data warehouse (EDW) appliances and partnership with Hortonworks, Teradata has moved aggressively to offer Hadoop solutions as an appliance. The Teradata distribution for Hadoop includes integration with Teradata’s management tool and SQL-H, a federated SQL engine that lets customers query data from its data warehouse and Hadoop. It also has Aster for analytics against Hadoop … Teradata’s extensive financial, technical, and management resources can create a unique, high-performance Hadoop appliance that few other vendors can match.”

Teradata believes that the new Forrester report provides recognition to key components of the Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop announced last year. The Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop is a one-stop-shop strategy for Hadoop that includes ready-to-deploy Hadoop appliances, advanced ecosystem integration and manageability software, and a complete set of client services to sharply accelerate production and time to value for our Hadoop customers.

As forward-thinking organizations launch big data programs, they will benefit from Teradata Consulting Services for Hadoop – which include complete training and strategic consulting. Teradata’s end-to-end Hadoop services guide customers through the complete process, and will advise, architect, and implement the solution as well as train, optimize and fully manage it to help customers realize competitive differentiation. Along with consulting expertise, Teradata Customer Support for Hadoop includes multiple support offerings to meet customer needs.

On a relevant note, Forrester analyst Charles Green, in a February 2014 Forrester blog post entitled “Organizations Will Rapidly Ramp Up Data Services Spend In 2014,” has foreseen an uptick in data services spending. “Improving the use of data and analytics is a top strategic priority for many companies. But organizations face major challenges ramping up their information management capabilities — in particular due to the combination of a brutal proliferation of new or enhanced technologies, emerging data sources, and difficulty in finding skilled people with the appropriate experience.” Data services are a rising priority, and Teradata has made services central to our Big Data and Hadoop offerings.

“Teradata continues to prove our strong commitment to Hadoop, providing our customers with the Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop,” said Scott Gnau, President, Teradata Labs. “There is still quite a bit of confusion and posturing in the marketplace around how to implement Hadoop – and Teradata is committed to helping our customers navigate through the market noise and architectural complexities and deliver business value. We believe Forrester’s positioning of Teradata as a leader validates our capabilities and services — and is illustrated in our customer successes.”

 “Our Hadoop Consulting and Support Services are strategic components of our Hadoop offerings – and a key reason we believe that we have been cited as a top big data Hadoop vendor by Forrester,” said Dan Harrington, Executive Vice President, Global Consulting and Support Services, Teradata. “Today Teradata offers support services for customers that use commodity equipment, Teradata Appliance for Hadoop, or software only.  This capability delivers best-in-class problem resolution and customer support, and is backed by Hortonworks for more advanced contributions back to the core.” 

Companies that have chosen Teradata’s integrated approach agree that the benefits of using the Teradata Unified Data Architecture (UDA) and the Teradata Portfolio for Hadoop to orchestrate Hadoop functionality are significant.  The Teradata UDA leverages the complementary value of best-in-class technologies from open source Apache Hadoop, Teradata, and Teradata Aster.

“The beauty of the UDA for us means that we can not only store the data in the right place, but we can minimize, or even in a lot of cases eliminate, the replication of data.  What we want to do is to store it in the right place, but be able to leverage the data where it sits,” said Rob Smith, Executive Director, IT, Verizon Wireless. “Aster with the discovery platform actually allows us to have those connections both to our Teradata data warehouse as well as our connection into the Hadoop distribution – so that we can have the insights on the data that sit in both locations without necessarily having to completely replicate the data as other solutions might require.”

The Teradata UDA environment is an ideal infrastructure for leveraging Hadoop, and includes innovative functionality that quickly ingests and preprocesses multi-structured data — and accelerates the delivery of business insight.

As the Hadoop and enterprise data warehouse markets have converged, Teradata’s advocated position has been positive, embracing the rise of Hadoop as a beneficial and complementary approach, a point of view underscored in a new blog by Scott Gnau.

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