Teradata Launches Big Data Application Initiative

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Teradata today as part of an effort to make it a lot simpler for organizations to derive business benefits from investments in Big Data, launched a raft of applications aimed at a broad range of vertical industries.

Chris Twogood, vice president of products and services marketing for Teradata, says rather than having to hire developers and data scientists to build Big Data applications from the ground up, organizations can now download them from the Teradata Aster AppCenter.

While many of these applications are integrated with Hadoop, Twogood says they all require instances of the Aster Data massively parallel database platform that Teradata acquired in 2011.

Twogood says that while there is no doubt that a mass migration in terms of Hadoop adoption is under way, most organizations don’t have the data management framework in place to actually derive any business value from those investments.

To that end, Teradata today also updated Teradata Loom, which creates a metadata framework around the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data that is rapidly becoming the de facto method of storing data, regardless of what device that data is generated on.

Layering that metadata framework on top of Hadoop then provides the structure that is required to manage a Big Data application environment, says Twogood. Teradata Loom, which Teradata gained via the acquisition of technology initially created by Revelytix, is available in both a free community edition and commercial offering.

In general, Twogood says that while Hadoop is transforming the way IT organizations think about data warehouse management, it’s only when customers get into trying to deploy Big Data applications at scale that they run into all the complexities associated with trying to manage all that data. As such, the best customer opportunities for Teradata ironically are now often organizations that have tried to replace their data warehouses with Hadoop. In recognition of that reality, Twogood says that next week Teradata will also unveil a series of Hadoop optimization offerings that will be delivered by the Think Big Analytics services arm of Teradata that the company acquired last year.

It remains to be seen to what degree Hadoop will transform data warehouses or simply replace them altogether. But Teradata is clearly betting there will be a lot more of the former than the latter when everything Big Data is finally said and done.