Teradata: We're going to concentrate on data analytics. So we've binned our top man

Teradata has axed its co-president for data and analytics, meaning Herman Wimmer is out of a job. In an SEC filing the company said it is exiting its marketing applications business so it "can focus exclusively on its core Data and Analytics business." This follows poor results in its third quarter. The filing says Teradata …

[Anonymous Coward]

Got the wrong one...

I hope Hermann got a good payoff. This and the other layoffs smack of desperation, not strategy.

[Gordon 10]

Get out whilst the getting is good

Since Teradata's high end, high performance, high volume analytics business is about to get its lunch eaten by Hadoop and its non-batch offspring - he might be well off out of it!

Teradata are far more vulnerable than Big Red or Big Blue (although IBM should be fairly worried). Its possible that the only thing of value left in a few years will be their industry model schema's running on other peoples DB instances.

[Ian Michael Gumby]

@Gordon Re: Get out whilst the getting is good

You seem to have a bit of an incomplete vision...

IBM - After their third attempt to enter the Hadoop market, they are making a fourth attempt by pushing their 'expertise' in analytics and are jumping on the Spark bandwagon. So they are starting to play in the Hadoop/Big Data space.

Oracle - they still have exadata and are partnering w Cloudera.

Teradata has entered the space via acquisitions.

So while they will lose some sales to big data, each have their own specialties that will still exist.

[Gordon 10]

Re: @Gordon Get out whilst the getting is good

You've missed the point Ian - its not that Teradata and everyone else aren't dabbling in the big data space its that Teradata is the only one whose entire business is about to be cannibalised by commodity hardware and software in the big data space. All the rest have decent revenues across the scale spectrum - Teradata don't. The only plays that are going to make money in the big data space are pure support & consultancty plays such as Cloudera's and HortonWorks or value add tooling/analytics.

Yes Teradata aquired an eye waveringly expensive visualisation provider a few years ago but that pretty much niche and being constantly eroded as Tom Cobbley and all jump on the same bandwagon.

[I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects]

Why do I get a picture of a single man with middle aged spread, turning up early for work with a big bag of white filters for the telephones and all the desks gone?