Can Teradata avoid being grounded by on-prem legacy? Actually it helps in avoiding nasty cloud costs, says CEO

As Teradata CEO for a little less than nine months, Steve McMillan has outlasted his predecessor, Oliver Ratzesberger, who took over in January 2019 after a period of bumpy financials. Yet McMillan's tenure so far has not exactly been an easy ride. While the data warehousing company put out reassuring Q4 financials, the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Challenging

I've no doubt lots of these points are valid around the relative maturity of cloud-first products like snowflake. But like everything, it's horses for courses and that creates opportunity for the database challengers. The thing that I'd be worried about if I was Teradata is the people buying Snowflake probably don't even know Teradata exists - I know I'd forgotten about them.

[Gunboat Diplomat]

Admin

It's worth pointing out teradata needs a lot of admin work which the cloud-native offerings heavily reduce. For, example you don't have to worry about creating indexes in fields on Redshift, etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Admin

Cloud based and reduce admin!? Have you seen the multiple admin panel abominations that are AWS, Google, etc.? Makes AD look like a walk in the park.

[Gunboat Diplomat]

Re: Admin

You do realise that having to manually create indexes inside a database cluster on lots of tables is time consuming and is separate from general infrastructure setup?

Yes AWS, etc has multiple admin panels but they give you a lot more than AD did (provision servers, serverless functions, database clusters, networking, etc). Besides, you can use terraform to script your provisioning anyway.

[sev.monster]

Re: Admin

There is also a distinct difference between service and server. With cloud, the second one goes mostly away, which is what sells CIOs on the whole thing—even if the first one becomes an absolute nightmare (looking at you 365 admin portals).

Comparing this stuff to AD isn't really equal no matter how you look at it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Admin

>For, example you don't have to worry about creating indexes in fields on Redshift, etc.

This is a bit like saying you don't have to worry about filling your Tesla with petrol. Technically, this statement is true, but rather misses the point.

[Gunboat Diplomat]

Re: Admin

It's nothing like that at all. In your analogy it would be because Tesla charged it automatically for you.

[sev.monster]

While I'm getting a lot of marketing smell from the words that exit his braincase, I get what mister CEO is saying—and I wish these cloud-first, container-first, and virtualization-first conpanies would take a note. Being able to spin up "unlimited if your budget can handle it" instances of XYZ service or add on the same for storage is not an excuse for piss-poor performance; neither is it a valid excuse that you should expect your cloud solution to be slower as a trade-off for migrating from on-prem. SaaS has reached a point where performance has taken a back-seat to cost-effectiveness and the general "robustness" and other such marketing nonsense of a product.

[Robert Grant]

They see that the capabilities that were provided by cloud-native solutions were either locking them into a particular cloud provider

This is a big thing. Postgres all the way!