Teradata ditches marketing to focus on analytics

teradata 1Teradata is pulling out of the marketing software market to concentrate on data and analytics in a move aimed at saving the firm $120m next year, as its core data warehousing business slows.
The company’s so-called “transformational changes” include offering software-only versions of its products and being available on Amazon Web Services in the first quarter of 2016.
The firm has typically sold integrated data warehousing systems, but that market has been hit by the adoption of cloud computing as well as big data.
Last month, the company consolidated its automated online advertising and customer marketing services into one centralised data management platform.
By selling its marketing applications business, Teradata said it will focus solely on growing its data and analytics unit. It is currently evaluating how many jobs will go as a result of the move.
The news comes as Teradata is cutting its outlook for the fourth quarter and 2015; the firm now expects revenue to decline between 6% and 8% in 2015.
In the third quarter, Teradata reported earnings of $78m, on revenue of $606m, down 9% from a year ago.
On a conference call with analysts, Teradata CEO Mike Koehler said the company’s move to put its software on public and private clouds should expand the market. In addition, Teradata will focus its big data investments.
He said: “Our first initiative is to expand our core data warehouse market opportunity where we are positioned as the leaders today, and represents the majority of our revenue. As noted on our last earnings call, we’ve been reengineering our core Teradata database for more than a year now to make it available as software only for both public and private clouds. This extends the market opportunity significantly for our core data warehouse business.
“We will release our initial software-only version for global deployment on Amazon’s cloud in the first quarter of 2016. This initial version can scale up to approximately 20 terabytes and do workloads such as departmental analytics, analytics sandboxes, smaller-sized integrated data warehouse, as well as test and development, and disaster recovery.
“Second, we will continue to rationalise our big data portfolio, focusing investments on solutions that can drive revenue growth and increase our relevance with customers in the dynamic analytic ecosystem – solutions such as Aster, where we recently announced we are making Aster analytics available on Hadoop in the second quarter of 2016 and will extend our market opportunity significantly.”

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