Cloud Database Report Podcast

In this episode of the Cloud Database Report Podcast, I talk with Ashish Yajnik, SVP of product management for data & analytics at Teradata, the old-school data warehouse company that is transitioning its platform and capabilities to the cloud.

I’ve been covering Teradata for more that 20 years. Here’s an article I wrote for InformationWeek in 2007 when NCR spun off Teradata as a separate company.

So I’ve been watching with interest as Teradata continues to modernize its data warehouse environment, Vantage. Many of Teradata's customers continue to manage enterprise data warehouses on premises, while transitioning to the cloud over months or years.

Yajnik is responsible for Teradata’s product transformation to the cloud, which puts him in the thick of things as the company repositions its traditional data warehouse for use in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

It’s worth noting that Teradata Vantage is available on all of the Big 3 public cloud platforms—AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. In our interview, Yajnik downplayed any competition with those heavy hitters, even though they call offer data warehouse platforms of their own. “We don’t see cloud service providers as competitors,” he said.

In fact, just last week Teradata announced an expanded partnership with Microsoft to integrate Teradata Vantage with Microsoft Azure. And in November, Teradata announced a three-year “strategic collaboration agreement” with AWS that includes, among other things, joint product development and integration.

Separately, Teradata has recently announced customer deals with Telefonica, Volkswagen, and Tesco.

We will learn more about how Teradata’s strategy is playing out when the company announces its financial results for Q4 and full-year 2021 on Feb. 7.

Highlights from the Podcast

Key topics from the interview include:

Teradata's priorities for the year ahead

Strategic collaboration with AWS on product development and integration of Vantage on AWS

Expanding use of AI & ML in Teradata environments

Customer projects, including Volkswagen for smart factories

What Teradata is doing to enable more data sharing

Teradata’s core strengths in this fast-changing competitive market

Quotes from the podcast:

"What we are embarking on is to make this whole multi-cloud journey much more intelligent and not so accidental for our customers."

"Our customers require a unified architecture from both companies [Teradata and AWS] in order to modernize and build their data and analytics platform."

"We are seeing a ton of interest in the analytics roadmaps, especially in the context of these industry data models."

"We've seen customers go to competitors, hit a brick wall in terms of their scaling needs, and come back to Vantage."

"Not all analytics are created equal."

Has the database market attempted to solve data complexity — only to create even more complexity?

That’s the argument of Raj Verma, CEO of SingleStore, who thinks he has the answer to the plethora of databases found in many of today’s IT environments: one database that can handle operational data, analytics, and many different data types in a single, unified platform.

It’s not a new idea — the database industry went down the path of “universal databases” back in the 1990’s (i.e. Illustra, Informix) — and SingleStore isn’t the only vendor with an all-purpose DBMS. But the company is establishing its database as a viable solution among the many that are out there. For that reason, I added SingleStore to the Cloud Database Report’s Top 20 list earlier this year (see below).

You may remember SingleStore by its former name, MemSQL. The company was rebranded in 2020, and has been growing, expanding, and building its database for modern applications.

On the latest episode of the Cloud Database Report podcast, I talked to CEO Raj Verma about the rebranding of SingleStore, multi-model databases, the competitive landscape — and Verma’s ambitious goal of being on the short list of preferred database providers for large organizations.

“We feel that enterprises will spend 95% of their database dollars on probably three companies in the future,” Verma says. “And we want to be one of them.”

Recent moves

SingleStore has hired two Microsoft veterans to lead engineering and product development. Shireesh Thota joins as SVP of engineering to oversee development of the company’s multi-model SQL database. And Yatharth Gupta head ups product management/design as VP of product management.

In an expanded partnership, IBM has agreed to license and support the SingleStore database. SingleStore was already available via IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data and in the Red Hat Marketplace. IBM has also become an investor in SingleStore.

Last September, SingleStore announced $80 million in Series F funding. Investors include Dell, HPE, and Google Ventures, among others.

As you can see, SingleStore is associating itself with some of the biggest names in enterprise tech. While that doesn’t assure success, it certainly lends credibility to its unified database proposition and strategic direction.

All of which serves as the backdrop for my conversation with Raj Verma.

Key topics from the interview include:

The rebranding of SingleStore

How 'Database 3.0' is different from earlier eras

What is data intensity?

All-purpose databases vs. purpose-built DBMS's

What organizations can do to simplify database sprawl

Rethinking the post-pandemic workplace

What’s next for SingleStore

Quotes from the podcast:

“Our mission is very simple. It is to unify and simplify modern data.”

“The volume, variety, and velocity of data just inundated enterprise organizations.”

“We feel the future will belong to a database that can combine a vast majority of workloads in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment.”

“The personality of data is ever evolving.”

“The shelf life of data is going down dramatically, and the volume is increasingly. So without speed, you're going to be done — you know what I mean?”

“This convergence of databases is a foregone conclusion, in my opinion....I am fairly confident that there will be a massive consolidation in the database space.”

This audio article was originally published by the Cloud Database Report on March 2, 2022.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has long served as a proof point of a vendor’s relevance in its respective market. But what about those that don’t make it into the quadrant? Here are my observations about six key players—DataStax, Micro Focus, MongoDB, Neo4j, Yellowbrick Data, and Yugabyte—that were not included in Gartner’s Cloud Database MQ for 2021.

You can listen here, or read the full story below.

Hi everyone! This is an update to my recent blog post on the final days of the legacy data warehouse (link below).

The topic of legacy data warehouses slowly fading away struck a chord with many readers. Now we have updates from Snowflake and Teradata.

On Aug 24, the same day I published “The Final Days of the Legacy Data Warehouse,” Snowflake announced its earnings for Q2 FY2023. Not surprisingly, a question about legacy systems came up during Snowflake’s earnings call. One financial analyst asked Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman about the level of activity of customers migrating from on-premises systems to Snowflake’s data cloud.

Slootman: “In the last week, I've heard two very, very iconic names in two different industries that were staunch on-premises people, who would never ever go cloud, and that are now going [cloud]. So I just feel that the resistance is completely breaking....A lot of this is that they’re going to get left behind. You can’t take advantage of innovations that are only available on the cloud. We’re going to see acceleration out of this.”

Is he right? I have no doubt that he is.

According to Ocient, 59% of respondents to its survey are actively looking to switch data warehouse providers. They specifically named IBM, Cloudera, and Teradata as the top 3 legacy environments that data managers want to move away from.

Their reasons:

· 40% want to modernize their legacy platforms

· 42% feel their existing system isn’t comprehensive enough, and

· 36% say it’s not flexible enough

This explains why Snowflake, with its data cloud and data marketplace, has become such a tour de force. Other disruptors are Databricks, Firebolt, SingleStore, TileDB, Yellowbrick, and of course AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

I would include Ocient as well, with its hyperscale data warehouse platform, which is capable of analyzing trillions of records.

The old guard responds

Where does that leave traditional data warehouse providers—companies like IBM and Teradata? They know that their customers want newer, cloud-native platforms. And they’re taking steps to modernize their offerings.

That brings me back to Teradata, which recently made a product announcement that is relevant to this whole discussion.

Teradata is synonymous with the older data warehouses that many organizations are looking to replace. But Teradata is fighting back, as SVP Ashish Yajnik described to me in an earlier Cloud Database Report podcast conversation (link below).

Teradata’s new cloud-native architecture

Now, Teradata has just introduced VantageCloud Lake, a new and improved cloud data warehouse that is based on a cloud-native architecture. With modern capabilities like object storage in the cloud, auto scaling, and self-service in AWS, and soon to be available in other clouds.

So the decision to move to a cloud data warehouse is getting easier, but also harder in some respects.

Easier because that’s the inevitable direction the industry is heading. For CIOs and CTOs the question is when, not if.

Harder because incumbent vendors like Teradata are not standing by while Snowflake and Databricks pick off their installed base. They’re responding with cloud-native platforms of their own.

Who will be the next leaders in this fast-changing market? We’ll have to wait a while longer for the query results on that question.

Yellowbrick Data is a 7-year-old startup that continues to grow in the highly competitive cloud data warehouse market. Yellowbrick recently raised $75 million in its latest round of capital funding as it expands into a variety of industries, including telecom, healthcare, retail, and manufacturing.

Yellowbrick describes itself as a cloud-native data warehouse. It is available for deployment on premises and in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Key topics from the interview include:

• What make a database or data warehouse cloud native? APIs, open source, storage tiers, networking. How does Yellowbrick define it?
• One of the key things with cloud-native data warehouses is the separation of storage and compute. It gives you scalable storage and dynamic compute resources.
• Not all approaches to storage/compute are the same. Yellowbrick has published a white paper that defines six different levels of storage/compute separation.
• There are performance and workload advantages, but also important considerations around cost.

Quotes from the podcast:

• "The separation of storage and compute is table stakes for cloud data warehouses today."
• "The ultimate goal is a data warehouse that provides the same cloud experience wherever you need to deploy it for business needs or business reasons. That could be data sovereignty, data gravity, regulations, security, latency and things like that, but provide the same easy-to-consume experience throughout."
• "We're addressing two problems: One, software in data warehouses is not as efficient as it could be. And second, there's a lot of unpredictability around the costs of running these systems."
• "Democratization of data and analytics is a key trend. And making a self-service experience for line-of-business users is critical."