Interview: Teradata CTO Stephen Brobst

Teradata, a data warehousing and analytics firm that counts such giants of commerce as eBay, Wal-Mart and Dell among its customers, has recently been named as the industry leader in its field by analyst Gartner.

Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems” places the company at the top of the pile in terms of ability to execute and completeness of vision, ahead of competitors Oracle and IBM.

“Someone asked me how much we paid Gartner to be at the top,” says Teradata’s chief technology officer (CTO), Stephen Brobst. “Teradata is a data warehouse platform. We don’t have an ETL [extract, transform, load] tool, or a BI [business intelligence] tool, or even a data mining tool. I can go to Oracle and they’ve got everything. How can Teradata have outperformed their products?”

According to Brobst, Gartner’s accolade is the result of a difference in strategy.

Best-of-breed partners

“Teradata’s strategy is that we want best-of-breed capability. No one vendor will be best of breed at everything. Our completeness of vision is the result of choosing best-of-breed partners,” he explains.

Teradata does not own a data mining solution, but it partners with business analytics software developer SAS, which does. Brobst says that SAS is widely recognised as a best-of-breed company in data mining.

“We want to be a best-of-breed rather than a stack player. IBM is more or less the same as Oracle, in this regard. They have the hardware and the database, they acquired Cognos for BI, and SPSS for the data mining.”

Brobst explains that his strategy is to fill the gaps in his portfolio with the best offerings from other vendors in the BI and analytics industry. And this approach can even extend to putative competitors, what he terms the “co-opetition” model.

“If you want to be best of breed, it means you can’t draw battle lines,” he says. “If we think SPSS is in the top three of data mining tools – and we do – then we will integrate with it.”

Most enterprise BI and analytic tools work to an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard, which also means they will interoperate with Teradata’s tools.

However, Brobst explains that this is not the same as the “deep integration” in which his company specialises.

“There are three approaches: deep integration, certification and ‘it will work’. When we see best of breed, we choose deep integration.”

Deep Integration

“Certification” means that the products have been tested together, and that the involved parties guarantee that they will co-operate, which is a step up from a pat on the back and a blithe “Don’t worry, it’ll work.” But deep integration means that the vendors are in partnership, and their product road maps are intertwined.

“Deep integration means I’ve met with their CTO and we have agreed what we’re going to deliver. We implement stuff to make them successful, and they do likewise. You can’t do this without partnership.”

He adds that SAS code runs inside the Teradata database.

“No other database does that. [Our competitors] claim integration with SAS, but that’s just at the certification level. Deep integration means you have engineering teams working together, not just combined marketing.”

He adds that what he terms the “stack companies” integrate their marketing and pricing lists with partners, but not the actual engineering. He argues, somewhat controversially, that the Oracle Data Integrator tool is more effectively integrated with Teradata than it is with Oracle itself.