Teradata president and CEO Mike Koehler and CTO Stephen Brobst have an exclusive, frank discussion about where the new Teradata is going.

MK: You know, Stephen, Teradata is entering exciting times. We started the year by announcing our plan to spin off from NCR, and here we are, only months later: the global enterprise data warehouse market leader and now an independent company, too.

SB: I've heard a lot of congratulations. NCR was a very good parent company, but it was time for the bird to leave the nest — time for Teradata to pursue a business strategy appropriate for us alone. I think most people—our employees, our customers and the analysts—view this as Teradata coming into its own. It's an exciting opportunity.

MK: Yes, and we've always been known for our culture—our passion and competitive drive and helping our customers succeed. And it doesn't hurt that the Teradata cash position is very solid. The spinoff will give us complete control over how we invest and allow us to pursue our goals more effectively. We're prepared for what's to come. We can build on this new independence—extending our technology lead, expanding solutions and offers, enhancing data management and consulting services—all to help our customers realize even greater value.

SB: And companies really need us. Most businesses are becoming more competitive by making better decisions, rather than by more efficient transaction processing. We can help them excel through better, faster decision making.

MK: Every day, these organizations face more decisions, more complexity and more data. That's a big challenge. And then there's the exponential rise in the number of decision makers in an organization. Instead of a handful of executives deciding who gets a better interest rate or an upgrade to first-class, you have hundreds or even thousands of frontline employees making those decisions, and they need the information that helps them make better decisions, too. Decisions in line with corporate strategy.

These enterprises need to push information out...to suppliers, customers and business partners. Establishing a robust business ecosystem will accelerate the spread of intelligence and facilitate quicker and better-informed decisions.

SB: True. And an active enterprise data warehouse that handles all of this information—delivering both strategic and operational intelligence—is very different than the technology needed for transaction processing. Some organizations make the mistake of thinking they can use legacy relational database technology, but it's like saying that my standard tool for building a house is a hammer. If the only tool I have is a hammer, then all I can really do well is drive nails.

The analytics that these companies need is a different thing. A good carpenter has a selection of tools, and he chooses the right one for each job. Teradata provides those tools—the enterprise data warehouse platform, the implementation methodology and professional services team, and the support services—so we can deliver the right solution for the problem.

MK: Exactly. We want to leverage our industry expertise, bring to bear years of best practices and share that through our consulting services. Then we can add the expertise we have on data management, architecture, governance—all of the things that help companies manage their data as a strategic asset.

SB: Doing all that means that customers need a flexible technology infrastructure. They need to be able to adapt quickly to changes, to be responsive to market trends, handle regulatory issues as they arise.

MK: It goes back to having the right technology in place, having a winning strategy, executing well and then measuring performance. That's where we can help.

SB: This is all about continued pursuit of the competitive agenda that we established years ago.

MK: Agreed, but the difference is that now we have more freedom and agility to pursue those goals. We're ramping up our investment to advance our R&D goals. And we'll continue to acquire different strategic and tactical technologies and work with more partners. In that sense, the new Teradata isn't that different from the old Teradata. We still want to be years ahead of our competition!

SB: I love the technology, but it doesn't mean anything if you're not delivering value. We've always focused on the solution first, technology second. Our go-to-market strategy is led by our industry consultants, who are actually business people. They understand the technology, but it's really the business alignment that's critical. The whole active enterprise intelligence initiative is about aligning and accelerating the value proposition for the underlying technology.

MK: Historically, the business intelligence marketplace has focused on strategic intelligence—making long-term strategic decisions, with a focus on the corporate decision makers.

SB: Strategy is good. But in the end the strategy is only as good as its execution. With the active enterprise intelligence capability we deliver, Teradata is providing business intelligence to frontline and ivory tower decision makers. When we help customers align strategy and execution, we give them one single view of the enterprise. Every outcome of a tactical, frontline execution of a decision is captured in the data warehouse and analyzed to drive continuous improvement of strategies and execution.

MK: Well, as we say, "the smartest and fastest wins." Smart organizations use all the detail in those volumes of data; that's what helps them make faster, smarter decisions.

SB: And the growth in detail is exponential. The technology to be able to handle that level of scalability is what Teradata alone delivers.

MK: Right. We allow organizations not only to see the big picture, but also to drill down to the detail. To find those details that are going to deliver competitive insight—that's our differentiator.

SB: Because just working with summarized data or being limited in the questions you can ask with non-scalable technology isn't smart. And it doesn't help you win. I think we can promise our customers that we're going to continue to lead the market and help them lead within their own categories.

MK: Ultimately, it comes back to the customers. Our first priority is to provide them with leading products, services and solutions that help them meet their challenges and achieve success. Our commitment to customers is the driving force—for the old Teradata and especially for the new.

SB: We'll continue to focus on our core competence of delivering analytics on a large scale, but we'll also deliver high performance in a cost-effective way.

MK: Well, we can talk about scale all day, but relevance is just as important.

SB: Yes, recognizing which data is "hot" and "cold"—temperature being a metaphor for how often data is accessed. We want to help customers deploy solutions that manage large volumes of multi-temperature data by leveraging sophisticated resource management capabilities and Teradata's self-managing file system. Managing data temperature effectively yields optimized price performance because it opens the door to additional storage options beyond standard configurations.

MK: Let's talk more about that. There's fallback, automatic failover with hot stand-by nodes, full disaster recovery capability—these all help our customers get maximum value from their Teradata installations.

SB: Precisely. The data warehouse is becoming more and more mission-critical. More and more customers are asking for multiple Teradata systems that can cooperate in the delivery of a high-availability solution with instantaneous failover. Moreover, customers want full utilization of both the primary and secondary platforms in a dual active configuration using automatic workload balancing and real-time replication services. There is still so much we want to do.

MK: And we've got people to get it done—nearly 6,000 impassioned employees who wake up every day and think about data warehousing and analytics. We have a great set of solutions and a tremendous roster of more than 850 customers. It's why we are the technology and market leader. Now that the new Teradata era has begun, I see a really bright future for all of us. T

Michael Koehler, who honed his team-building skills while playing college football, is the new president and CEO of Teradata. With 32 years of Teradata experience, Mike is known for his extreme customer focus as well as his ability to absorb and distill the best customer feedback and coworker ideas into productive and profitable Teradata solutions.

Stephen Brobst, a world-class technologist, academic, researcher and entrepreneur, is the CTO of Teradata. He is challenged by the opportunity to help Teradata drive change in the data warehousing marketplace, transforming the vision for active enterprise intelligence into reality.

Teradata Magazine-December 2007