Teradata CPO: 'We're seeing enterprises having a very strategic focus on being multi-cloud'

'If history has taught me anything, it’s that open ultimately becomes the winner,' says Hillary Ashton

The coming era of enterprise IT will be defined by true hybrid and multi-cloud at scale, says Hillary Ashton, chief product officer at Teradata.

Teradata's customers are Global 10,000 organisations, large and complex companies and institutions that need to take a long view. The current focus on hybrid cloud is entirely practical, she said. While they may be moving some workloads to the cloud, their sheer size means this cannot happen overnight, and security and compliance issues will require some data and applications to remain in the data centre for the foreseeable future.

Turning to multi-cloud, Ashton says this is very much part of the long-term strategy for many Teradata customers.

"'We're seeing enterprises having a very strategic focus on being multi-cloud. One area that's key is obviously managing total cost of ownership. Another is not getting locked into one cloud vendor, they want the flexibility to move to one cloud provider to another."

However, while most operate a type of 'multi-cloud' setup - using the services of more than one cloud as the result of mergers and acquisitions and the individual choices of developer teams - a ‘true' hybrid multi-cloud, where data and applications can move freely between rival platforms "will take a little while", Ashton said. Nevertheless, she said she's confident that the day will come.

"If history has taught me anything it's that open ultimately becomes the winner," she said. "Open is where people land: open data, open platform, open partner ecosystems. But that will take time and customers will probably be a bit fickle."

In the meantime, organisations operate across cloud and on-premises silos and the important thing is to be able to integrate and unify the data within them as seamlessly as possible. Which is Teradata's goal with Vantage - the company's cloud analytics platform runs on-premises as well as in AWS, Azure and the recently added GCP - and also the QueryGrid 'high-speed data fabric' that enables SQL querying and parallel data movement across multiple data sources including Oracle, Apache Spark and Hive and the main cloud players and data warehouses too.

But of course Teradata is not alone in offering such functionality, and while recent years have seen the firm pivot successfully to the cloud, many will associate it with on-premises data centres. There are numerous cloud-native startups and more established firms like HPE and Oracle with products with apparently similar spec sheets, as well as cloud data warehouses like Snowflake. Ashton acknowledged this fact, while insisting things are very different at the larger end of the spectrum.

"We have always been and continue to be highly differentiated at scale," she said. "So lower cost per query, and also from a cost - performance perspective."

Ashton continued: "We see competition everywhere. I'd be kidding you if I said I didn't see it from smaller startups, but time and again clients are giving competitors a quick look and seeing that it takes forever to migrate, so they stay with Teradata and migrate to the cloud with us. Our internal assessment is that we at least 3 or 4 years ahead of younger startups in this area."

Other competition comes from the cloud providers themselves, with the likes of AWS offering their own analytics and orchestration tools.

In 2017, as part of its hybrid and multi-cloud pitch, Teradata introduced portable licensing (‘bring your own licence') to its software, reducing the complexity of portability, and last year it announced the general availability of pay-as-you-go Consumption Pricing for Vantage.

The company is also seeking to ensure its software integrates with as many of the relevant native cloud services as it can.

"One of biggest opportunities for Teradata is to ensure we can help customers get to value in cloud by embracing cloud ecosystem," said Ashton, reeling off a list of integrations that include 17 with AWS services such as AWS Glue and RedShift, 13 with Azure and 10 with GCP.

"We're taking the best of Teradata Vantage and combining it with the best in the cloud."