eBay's Teradata implementation headed to 20 petabytes

EBay, one of Teradata’s largest customers, will more than double the petabytes in its data warehouse over the next year.
Curt Monash of Monash Research recaps a few key points from a conversation with eBay this week. Teradata often cites eBay as a reference customer. Among the main items:

• EBay’s Teradata implementation is now topping 10 petabytes. That will grow to 20 petabytes next year.
• The Teradata database is called Singularity and ingests data so it’s easier to index and query.
• The auction giant has Teradata technology for transactions as well as enterprise data.
• Hadoop is on eBay’s radar and will be used for analyzing images. However, Hadoop isn’t eBay’s favored way of crunching data.

That final point speaks to the hybrid approach emerging in data warehousing and analytics. Corporations are likely to mix and match Hadoop with Teradata and similar systems. That’s why Teradata has been in such a rush to build connectors to Hadoop via deals with Cloudera, which also has a similar partnership with EMC’s Greenplum.
Teradata has been cited as a potential acquisition for Hewlett Packard, which needs to bolster its analytics portfolio. Meanwhile, new CEO Leo Apotheker has to expand HP’s software portfolio.
Related:

• Apotheker’s HP challenge: Solving for software
• IBM scoops up Netezza for $1.7 billion, broadens data analytics lineup
• IBM acquires Netezza as big data market continues to consolidate around appliances, middle market, new architecture
• Teradata unveils cloud strategy, answer for Oracle’s Exadata machine
• Teradata launches virtual storage software; Seeks hot and cold data

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Teradata delivers strong quarter, ups 2010 outlook

Teradata delivered a strong quarter across the board and raised its outlook for the year.
The company reported third quarter earnings of $75 million, or 44 cents a share. Non-GAAP earnings were 46 cents a share. Teradata’s third quarter revenue tally of $489 million was up 15 percent from a year ago.
Wall Street was expecting earnings of 39 cents a share on revenue of $464.2 million.
Meanwhile, Teradata increased its outlook for 2010. The company projected revenue growth of 12 percent up from its previous outlook for growth of 8 percent to 10 percent. Teradata also projected earnings of $1.71 a share to $1.74 a share. Non-GAAP earnings were projected to be $1.80 to $1.83. Wall Street was expecting 2010 earnings of $1.70 a share.
Teradata’s results are notable given that it plays in the hot data warehousing and analytics market. The company also happens to be a fine acquisition target for larger players trying to beef up their analytics capabilities.
By the numbers:

• Gross margin was 57.1 percent in the third quarter, up from 53.4 percent a year ago.
• Revenue in the Americas was $292 million, up 18 percent from a year ago. Europe Middle East and Africa revenue was $109 million, and Asia Pacific/Japan sales were $88 million.
• The company ended the quarter with $741 million.

Teradata rolls out latest database, pushes time aware analysis

Teradata on Monday said its Database 13.10 is available and stumped for better time aware analysis in data warehousing applications.
So-called temporal analysis refers to the ability to analyze data based on changes in history instead of just the most current data. Teradata argues that seeing how data changed will cut down on the use of customer reports as sell as implementation times. In a nutshell, Teradata Database 13.10 time-aware capabilities are supposed to highlight how markets have changed rather than how they look at one point in time.
Teradata’s latest database will automatically update and check changes by date so there’s a complete change history. Typically, these time-data updates required manual scripts. For instance, automated time analysis could highlight how a sales region may perform if a star sales team moves to another division through time. Product sales can be tracked year over year even if the goods change categories.

The database update, along with hardware tweaks, comes as Teradata is one of the few independent data warehousing players left. Oracle is gunning for Teradata with its Exadata product line. Meanwhile, IBM bought Netezza in a move to bolster its analytics appliance line-up.
Among other Teradata odds and ends Monday:

• Database 13.10 also features new compression technology to save storage space and better analytics precision.
• Teradata’s platform will feature the latest Intel Xeon processors.
• Those new processors along with other design enhancements provide a performance boost for the Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 5650.
• Teradata is also shipping the Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance 4600, which runs completely on solid state drive (SSD) technology to cut lag time.
• The Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2650 was updated along with the 1650 and the Data Mart Appliance 560, which is an entry-level data warehousing appliance.

• Teradata will support seven new SAP Business Objects applications including new services and on-demand options.
• Karmasphere will provide software to build and run MapReduce jobs. The upshot is that customers can access Hadoop and Teradata files with simple interfaces.
• Teradata is also updating its relationship manager tools with new dashboards and reporting. These reports will also be available on Android and iPad devices.

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Teradata Partners with RainStor for Big Data Retention and Retrieval

RainStor’s innovative technology significantly improves on-line data retention and retrieval for compliance needs

SAN FRANCISCO – Teradata Corporation (NYSE:TDC), today announced a partnership with RainStor, Inc. to provide specialized data retention capabilities enabling customers to keep compliance data for longer periods of time at a low cost. With RainStor’s innovative technology, data is de-duplicated and compressed enabling a 97 percent storage footprint reduction. Additionally, data is directly accessible online and can be queried using standard SQL language and a number of other business intelligence tools.
This new partnership addresses the challenge of spiraling costs associated with retaining large and growing volumes of historical data. With built-in data reduction capabilities, the cost of retaining multi-terabytes, growing to petabytes goes down significantly. Organizations can now meet industry compliance regulations, and also improve enterprise intelligence by ongoing access to larger volumes of historical data.

Many Teradata customers, in a mix of industries, have begun to delve into massive volumes of historical detailed data, as these customer examples demonstrate.

Telecommunications – U. S. and European Union regulations require that telecommunication providers retain call detail records (CDR) and also Internet protocol detail records (IPDR), which are created by smart phone users. The data must be retained for a minimum 12 months and be readily available to law enforcement agencies for criminal investigations. The challenge for telecommunications providers is that they now create millions of CDRs and IPDRs per day.

Retailers – With Teradata, retailers are able to meet sales tax compliance reporting and auditing requirements by analyzing millions of transactions, which occurred over several years and involved thousands of products, across thousands of stores. By executing this detailed analysis in hours or a few days, not weeks and months, retailers can ensure that they are properly paying their taxes, which saves time, reduces labor costs, and avoids penalties and fines.

Finance – A financial services customer stores 14 years of historical consumer banking data on everyone who has opened and closed an account to enable easy access for archival retrieval in support of governmental compliance.

“Our partnership with RainStor’s specialized data compression and reduction software helps broaden Teradata’s reach to the retention market. This complements the Teradata Purpose-Built Platform and back-up, archive and recovery solutions,” commented Scott Gnau, chief development officer, Teradata Corporation. “This solution can eliminate the need to store historical data on tape and thereby avoid any business risk of not providing immediate response in compliance situations.”

“Most industry sectors are now required to maintain online access to historical data, which not only complies with regulations but drives smart business decisions for a competitive advantage,” said John Bantleman, chief executive officer, RainStor, Inc. “We are very excited about the combined data retention capabilities Teradata and RainStor are bringing to market, which we believe to be a unique industry offering that meets today’s big data problem.”

About RainStor
RainStor is a technology pioneer in online information preservation. The company’s specialized data repository significantly reduces the total cost of retaining data through extreme data reduction, simplified data management and near-perfect scalability. RainStor solutions are deployed by technology partners across multiple industries to reduce the cost and complexity of preserving information in the enterprise or the cloud. RainStor is a privately-held company with offices in San Francisco, U.S.A. and Gloucester, UK. For more information, visit http://www.rainstor.com.

About Teradata 
Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is the world’s largest company solely focused on raising intelligence and achieving enterprise agility through its database software, enterprise data warehousing, data warehouse appliances, consulting, and enterprise analytics. Visit Teradata on the web at www.teradata.com.

Teradata is a trademark or registered trademark of Teradata Corporation in the United States and other countries.

Teradata completes $525M acquisition of Indy firm

Miami Twp.-based Teradata said Monday it has completed its acquisition of Aprimo, a company focused on cloud-based marketing software.

Last month, Teradata said it had agreed to acquire the Indianapolis-based company for $525 million.

The acquisition of privately held Aprimo is Teradata’s largest acquisition since becoming independent of former parent NCR Corp. in 2007.

Bruce Langos, Teradata chief operations officer, told the Dayton Daily News last month that about 400 new employees would join the company once the acquisition was complete. He did not know then if any employees would move to Teradata’s local headquarters, near the Austin Boulevard interchange with Interstate 75.

Teradata, which calls itself “the world’s largest company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics,” has about 400 Dayton-area employees.

Aprimo offers computing services and marketing software and counts more than 35 Fortune 100 companies as customers.

Teradata completes Aprimo acquisition

Indianapolis -- Ohio-based Teradata Corp. has completed the $525 million purchase of software developer Aprimo, which remains headquartered in Indianapolis. The 400 Aprimo employees join the 6,000 workers of publicly traded Teradata, which calls itself "the world's largest company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics." The deal means Aprimo's cloud-based marketing software used by many Fortune 100 companies will be added to the database expertise of Teradata. (Star report)