Today I'm in San Diego visiting data-warehousing specialist Teradata (meeting with CTO Todd Walter pictured). But don't think I'm at the beach blogging this: the R&D facility is situated in Rancho Bernardo, north of the city, in an unappealing concrete squared campus but with 131 trees!

Inspite an apparent lack of communication between the company's international flacks (from France, Germany, Italy and the U.S.!) - yesterday evening's meeting was cancelled without notice and the scheduled 1:1 interviews were actually never booked! - I survived this trip "exclusively" (dis)-organised for the European media: 3 Italian reporters (I didn't realise Italy was such a major market for Teradata!), a Spaniard and a French (and surprisingly no Brits nor Germans... probably on vacation this time of year :). Actually, I should consider myself lucky as my Belgian colleague did not even made it to San Diego and had to fly back To Belgium from NYC because of bad weather over central U.S.

And to be honest, I also thought about flying back last night but I'm glad I didn't because the executives, the presentations and the overall topic were interesting. After the jump, the video of Teradata's marketing director Chris Twogood presentation on the competition, by far the most interesting of the day.

Albeit a bias view in favour of Teradata, nonetheless Twogood comments really helped understand the positioning of the various solutions from HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft as well as from start-ups like Netezza or DATAllegro.

Database Teradata 12 is company's crown jewel

In the following video Twogood explains the new Teradata server family that now better addresses the "low-end" of the market with a starting price point of $67,000 per terabyte up to $200,000. Knowing that a jet engine generates about 2 terabyte of data per minute and that a typical test last about 20 minutes you can easily imagine the cost of such systems! Twogood also covers the various requirements for a data warehouse database and some of the companies competing in this market.
For example, HP Neoview, DATAllegro, Netezza and Teradata 2500 server are delivering a decision support capability targeted to basic reporting, ad-hoc analysis, and a little bit of predicting. Oracle and IBM take it up from there but only Teradata can reach the St Graal with a "full active database".



Gartner's Magic Quadrant shows Teradata leader of data warehouse market

In this video, Twogood also touts that Teradata is 2-3 years ahead of its competition.



What Teradata thinks of its competition?

HP Neoview came to market too quickly i.e. is still an unfinished product inspite "buying out" some customers. Appliance maker Netezza is a "throw away" solution that can't scale up to a certain size. After it reached its limit, customers just toss the appliance and migrate to a bigger player like Teradata, Oracle or IBM.

Teradata on HP Neoview



Teradata on Microsoft/DATAllegro