Teradata Aster Discovery Platform Offers Powerful Data Science Solution in a Box

SAN DIEGO, Feb. 20, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading analytic data solutions company, today introduced Teradata Aster Discovery Platform 5.10, the first and most comprehensive discovery solution with more than 20 new big data analytic capabilities, including purpose-built visualizations. Insights from these analytics can empower organizations to be more profitable by enhancing customer engagement and improving sales.

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The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform reduces the difficulties associated with big data analytics. Now, customers can easily and seamlessly acquire, prepare, analyze, and visualize petabyte-sized volumes of multi-structured data in a single platform with a single structured query language (SQL) command. The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform provides users with out-of-the-box visual functions that make it faster and easier to build big data analytic applications and unlock hidden insights.  

"Existing and aspiring data scientists should take note. The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform is full of new capabilities that can empower them to accelerate their innovation and supply new options to their business users," said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. "It is Teradata's goal to be our customers' trusted partner in building a Unified Data Architecture™, which includes a powerful set of big data solutions. The result is effective deployment of transformational technology that drives tangible results."

For organizations seeking value from big diverse data, the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform offers an enterprise-friendly, ready-to-deploy suite of integrated hardware, software, and best-of-breed partner solutions. Its open platform approach leverages enterprise business intelligence (BI), data integration, analytics, and visualization tools. The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform is easy to use by any SQL-savvy analyst or business user, and it is powerful and flexible enough for the most sophisticated data scientists.

The challenges facing businesses desperately needing the insights from big diverse data are daunting. Many businesses remain focused on the storage and management of multi-structured data, or have multiple disconnected, dis-functional technologies, or don't have skilled employees and resources to start a big data analytics initiative.

"With newly added analytics and visualization functionality, the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform offers the convenience of a 'data scientist in a box,'" said Dan Vesset, program vice president of business analytics and big data, IDC. "Much of the market attention has been on vendors trying to build SQL engines on Hadoop. Teradata Aster Discovery Platform already provides an ANSI SQL-compliant method with its SQL-MapReduce^® framework to acquire, prepare, analyze, and visualize data from any data source including Hadoop. Without the need to integrate multiple point solutions, customers using this Teradata technology are able to accelerate the discovery process and visualize information in new and exciting ways, and to focus the scarce expertise of data scientists on highest value- added tasks."

The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform is open and allows customers to integrate existing big data analytic tools. This enables customers to use the richest set of analytical techniques available today. The new, key technical enhancements within the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform include:

Visual SQL-MapReduce^® functions - These functions offer unique capabilities that generate sophisticated purpose-built data visualizations coupled with other Aster SQL-MapReduce^® analytical functions generated inside the database. The functions complement business intelligence functionality. For example, customer behavior patterns, graphs, and product affinity are instantly visualized. With Teradata Aster's integrated data acquisition, preparation, analytics, and visualization capabilities, the entire analytics process is highly iterative, and only takes minutes versus weeks compared to other big data solutions.

In-Database "R" execution capability - The popular open source statistical language, R, has been tightly integrated inside the Teradata Aster Database. Data scientists now have more choices for executing advanced analytics. Because of this integration, SQL-savvy analysts or business analysts can take advantage of Aster's massively parallel processing (MPP) platform to score statistical models on massive data volumes.

Support for In-Database PMML execution via Zementis – Tight integration between Zementis and Teradata Aster Database empowers business analysts to develop statistical models in tools of their choice. Analysts can seamlessly export and import the statistical models in Aster to take advantage of Aster's MPP platform to score models at scale.

In-Database Integration of Attensity^® capabilities - Attensity's market-leading text and sentiment analytic capabilities are being integrated inside the Aster Database. This enables text and sentiment analytics to be an integral part of the big data discovery process and can be easily combined with other analytical techniques including SQL-MapReduce^® functions, and Visual SQL-MapReduce^® Analytics.

Manufacturing and Financial Services Industry Analytics - To assist manufacturing and financial services companies, new SQL-MapReduce^® functions have been integrated. The manufacturing industry can improve processes that increase yield and reduce waste. Financial services companies can more quickly detect fraud and customer defection.

From within the Teradata Unified Data Architecture™, Teradata provides customers the ability to leverage best-of-breed partner tools. Follow the link to view comments from Teradata's valued partners – Attensity, Informatica, and Zementis.

Teradata Aster Discovery Platform 5.10 will be available by the end of second quarter 2013.

Teradata Unified Data Architecture™

The Teradata Aster Discovery Platform is a key component within the Teradata Unified Data Architecture - a best-of-breed framework enabling businesses to quickly uncover new business insights from all their data. Teradata Aster combines enterprise-friendly interfaces such as SQL, tightly integrated with next generation big data technologies such as MapReduce in the patented SQL-MapReduce^® framework. Also, the Teradata Aster Big Analytics Appliance provides industry-leading integration with Hadoop through its SQL-H™ interface, allowing very high performance SQL queries and Aster SQL-MapReduce^® analytics to be applied on Hadoop data. Finally, with more than 70 pre-built MapReduce analytical functions, and many third-party analytical add-ons.

About Teradata Aster

The Teradata Aster solution utilizes Aster's patented SQL-MapReduce^® to parallelize the processing of data and applications and deliver rich analytic insights through the simplicity of SQL and business intelligence tools. This SQL integration makes Aster easy enough for business analysts, but powerful enough for the most sophisticated data scientists in any organization. Companies including Barnes & Noble, Razorfish, Gilt Groupe, and SuperValu use Teradata Aster to deliver applications such as digital marketing intelligence, fraud detection, social network and relationship analysis, and deep information discovery. Learn more at teradataaster.com and via the Big Analytics & Discovery Blog.

About Teradata

Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC) is the world's leading analytic data solutions company, focused on integrated data warehousing, big data analytics, and business applications. Teradata's innovative products and services deliver data integration and business insight to empower organizations to make the best decisions possible for competitive advantage. Visit teradata.com for details.

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