Teradata Day One: Cloud & AI are key for analytics
Taking the stage at the Teradata conference, Peter Mikkelsen, Executive Vice President, Teradata Corporation, explained why companies need to focus on data capabilities for effectiveness of their businesses. “In the era of digital economy, data and analytics are fueling innovation and productivity. This is all made possible with a new asset: data. Data will quickly change how businesses are creating value across industries and how the society will change overtime. Most businesses are struggling with this and while everybody realizes you have to engage with the data in order to not become obsolete, it is really hard. If you don’t pick the right technology for your data needs, it will become a distraction in your data analytics journey,” Mikkelsen opined.
Earlier, business was driven by experience, however, today that is not valid. Data has the power to cause a dramatic change into how organisations work and function. Vic Lund, President and CEO, Teradata Corporation added to Mikkelsen’s argument and said, “The data revolution is very much like the industrial revolution that happened years ago. With data, we are on to something that is as impactful. Companies that don’t engage with the data will be affected. Most of our customers are very large and they have billions invested in information systems. We, at Teradata, are trying to figure that out and help customers derisk this process.”
For analytics to be effective, businesses need platforms that can scale and are simple to implement, rather than working in silos. Oliver Ratzesberger, Chief Operation Officer, Teradata, added, “Businesses are creating more and more data and technology silos; and these silos can be prohibitive when you want to answer questions like what does this data mean about customer 360? Organisations need a simple framework in order to be agile and scale so that they can focus on the business outcomes and not on the technology underneath it.”
The cloud factor
Teradata added cloud to its offerings a few years ago and is looking to accelerate the movement of significant customer analytic workloads to the cloud. According to a new survey by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Teradata, 83 per cent businesses agree that the cloud is the best place to run analytics. In the next five years, by the year 2023, most organisations want to run all of their analytics in the cloud. Ninety-one per cent say that analytics should be moving to the public cloud at a faster rate.
Some of the biggest barriers to moving analytics to the cloud, according to the survey, are security (50 per cent), immature and low-performing available technology (49 per cent), regulatory compliance (35 per cent) and lack of trust (32 per cent). Other concerns center on technology integration and talent: 30 per cent are struggling to connect legacy systems with cloud applications, while 29 per cent of respondents cited lack of in-house skill as a barrier.
Ratzesberger said, “Businesses need to understand that analytics is as business critical as any other systems they are deploying. There are four pillars in the cloud: performance, flexibility, security and availability. For achieving the move to the cloud, derisking is very important to the customer.”
Souma Das, Managing Director, Teradata India, said, “There is a strong shift towards the adoption of hybrid cloud environments in India. With the growing pace of technology change and innovation, businesses are increasingly looking for solutions that meet their advanced data analytics needs while at the same time optimizing their existing resources and allowing for speed and flexibility. Solutions like Teradata IntelliCloud will enable Indian businesses to derive more value in this data-driven world.”
Adding time to the mix
About 92 per cent organizations are not meeting their analytical needs, according a survey by Gartner. With newer technologies coming in every few years, it has become difficult for businesses to stay on top of the data game.
“With new algorithms and languages every day, we can’t keep up anymore with the new trends. Smart cities are everywhere and a lot of data is being created and that data is time sensitive. Data is changing constantly with time and so far everyone in the industry has ignored the time dimension because it is difficult and complex,” Ratzesberger added.
Giving an example, Ratzesberger highlights that while Boeing downloads data from a flight every time an airplane lands, the airplane is changing time to time once a technician puts a screwdriver to it and this change means it is a different airplane. Having the time dimension, added to this data will mean better analytics. To address this, Teradata recently rolled out 4D analytics, a new capability in advanced analytics that combines 3-dimensional geospatial location data with the fourth dimension of time. This advanced functionality is especially relevant in edge computing applications that exist to manage constantly changing time and location variables.
The AI Focus
Artificial intelligence and autonomous decisioning were two other trends Ratzesberger highlighted that businesses should look out for.
Sixty-nine per cent of Europe uses AI to automate repetitive process and tasks that currently require human environment. Seventy-seven per cent of APAC automate areas of work, reducing the need for costly human resource.
Ratzesberger said “AI is very promising and at the same time very dangerous. Over the next decade, AI won’t replace humans, but managements that use AI will put those that don’t out of business. We don’t have enough humans to deal with so much data that is being generated and AI can help you with that.”
