Teradata pushes 'Analytics of Everything' message as it launches real-time 'Listener' and integrated Hadoop and Aster UDA

Only one per cent of IoT data being capitalised on, says co-president Wimmer

Teradata has today staked a claim not just on the Internet of Things, but on what it's calling the "Analytics of Everything", launching products and services it must hope will give it a jump on its increasing number of rivals in the data analytics space.

Teradata Listener is described as "intelligent, self-service software with real-time 'listening' capabilities to follow multiple streams of sensor and IoT data wherever it exists globally" that will then "propagate the data into multiple platforms in an analytical ecosystem".

It will, of course, work best when "propagating" this data to Teradata's own platforms, such as the Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform 1800, which was announced recently.

However, as part of the company's increasing keenness to widen its options and work with Hadoop, the Teradata Aster Analytics software on Hadoop - also announced - will allow data analysis to scale on Apache's framework.

The other major announcement was another clear attempt to keep its options open, by merging Teradata Database, Teradata Aster Analytics and Hadoop capabilities into one hardware cabinet. The company pointed out that, to date, 95 per cent of Teradata customers still prefer to run Aster - which the company acquired in 2011 - on tin rather than just in software.

To summarise today's announcements, in the company's main keynote at Teradata's Partners 2015 conference in Anaheim, California, co-president Hermann Wimmer estimated that by 2025, 11 per cent of the world's economy will be drawn from the Internet of Things.

Wimmer added that currently only one per cent of IoT data is being correctly - and profitably - analysed for the good of the enterprise.

But on top of this need, Wimmer said he believes the scale of this data revolution will be even greater.

"There's a simple change of business model that I believe will be bigger. We all see what's happening with Uber," he said, referring to the company's ability to "change consumer expectation".

The analytics side of the Internet of Things, Wimmer also flagged up, exposed the recent VW emissions scandal.

It all points to the "Analytics of Everything," Wimmer summarised, before a video began to argue:

"We need more than the analytics of things because the world is more than just these things."

Marketing flim flam or not, Wimmer's points are backed up by technology from a company with a heritage stretching back 30 years. While rivals wave toothbrushes around on stage or put prototypical AI machines on quiz shows, Wimmer speaks of Volvo using IoT technology - supported by Teradata - to deliver shopping directly into peoples' cars, or invites beloved oven chip makers McCain on stage to extoll the virtues of data as a game-changer for creating the perfect steak-cut fry.

Founded in 1979, Teradata saw the "big data revolution" come up when this was all just fields.

"If you go back 20 or 30 years when it all started, [Teradata] was a point of sales system," said Wimmer.

"We wanted to understand, what does a customer buy, why does a customer buy? And then it was around the end of last century we began to add Excel data to make forecasts."

Wimmer believes that "data changed the technology", and that the company will begin to follow this creed.

Yodel's CIO, Adam Gerrard, recently extolled the virtues of Teradata as part of the company's £20m IT overhaul, while yesterday we heard how Turkcell maintains mobile dominance in Turkey with the help of Teradata analytics.

Computing will be catching up with more Teradata customers at the conference in coming days to build a clearer picture of what analytics has done - and will continue to do - to lead them into this "Analytics of Everything" future.