Teradata Provides the Simplest Way to Bring the Science of Data to the Art of Business

SAN CARLOS, Calif., Sept. 22, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the analytic data solutions company, today announced the new Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform that will speed adoption of big data analytics. Big data analytics can be transformative for business, and a valuable tool for increasing corporate profitability by unlocking information that can be used for everything from optimizing digital marketing or detecting fraud to measurement and reporting of machine operations in remote locations. However, until now, the cost of mining large volumes of multi-structured data and a widespread scarcity of staff with the required specialized analytical skills have largely prevented adoption of big data analytics.

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The new Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform marries MapReduce, the language of big data analytics, with Structured Query Language (SQL), the language of business analytics. It includes Aster Database 5.0, a new Aster MapReduce Appliance—which extends the Aster software deployment options beyond software-only and Cloud—and the Teradata-Aster Adaptor for high-speed data transfer between Teradata and Aster Data systems.

BI Research analyst Colin White said, "This boosts Teradata's story for analytics on large and complex data sets, thanks to Aster's focus on in-database MapReduce analytic processing of multi-structured data, making this capability more accessible for organizations through standard SQL and pre-packaged MapReduce-based modules."

Teradata Aster makes it easy for any business person to see, explore, and understand multi-structured data. No longer is big data analysis just in the hands of the few data scientists or MapReduce specialists in an organization, making it more useful and relevant to everyone in the company, enabling more users to discover the invisible correlations in the data that make businesses smarter, more successful. Now companies can build data equity, turning data from a cost into a source of value over their competitors.

"Getting the right data to the right person, process, and application is becoming more challenging because of the exploding volume and types of data, the impact of globalization, new requirements for compliance, and the inflexibility of current approaches. These factors are requiring enterprises to consider new and improved data management approaches, driven by requirements for performance, security, availability, manageability, and integration," according to Forrester Research, Inc., in a November 19, 2010 report, "Stay Alert to Database Technology Innovation."

With big data analytics, data becomes the raw material for doing business, and creating equity. Companies can identify and understand the interactions that impact customer experience, understand how customer behaviors predict outcomes, and use all of their data to create opportunities for new products and services. For instance, a telecommunications company can review call detail records to understand how customers experience its network. An insurance company can analyze sensor data, create products, and set pricing based on its understanding of driver behaviors, rather than on actuarial tables. An e-tailer can understand all the interactions and the search stream that lead to a purchase.

"Aster gives us the analytic capability to provide best-in-class digital marketing optimization for our clients, enabling more accurate marketing attribution," said Sunil Kavi, director of technology, Razorfish. "With Aster, we can help our clients understand every marketing interaction with consumers over time and across their entire online market ecosystem, knowing the impact of every marketing dollar spent."

Forrester Research has projected that interactive marketing spend will near $55 billion by 2014 as marketers shift budget away from traditional media. Using consumer behavioral inputs to attribute digital marketing impact, a company can optimize social media, search, and email marketing. Increasing budget effectiveness by five percent would save a company $1.6 million on a $32 million budget.

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Aster Database 5.0

"Companies have a hidden goldmine in the terabytes of multi-structured data that their customers and systems generate. By capturing and analyzing those datasets, they can better understand customer behavior thus increasing engagement, making better decisions and cutting down costs. Aster Database 5.0 makes such analytics much easier to deploy, cutting down on time-to-value and implementation costs," said Tasso Argyros, vice president of Aster product management and marketing, Teradata.

The Aster MapReduce Platform makes it simple to analyze large volumes of complex data such as Web logs, machine data, and text, while making it easier to perform more rich analysis than is possible with traditional SQL technology. Using Aster's patented analytical framework called SQL-MapReduce®, any business user can call MapReduce programs from a standard BI tool or from SQL itself.

Aster Database 5.0 delivers greater development flexibility to the patented SQL-MapReduce framework. It also includes pre-built MapReduce modules for behavioral clickstream interpretation, marketing attribution, decision tree analysis and other analysis. Other enhancements to Aster Database 5.0 include extensions to market-leading workload management framework to handle memory allocation of SQL and MapReduce processes, extended support for SQL Window functions, support for the latest versions of Red Hat and Novell SuSE Linux distributions, as well as various SQL performance enhancements.

"Teradata Aster takes the power of MapReduce for big data discovery and puts it in the hands of the business users," said Dan Jewett, vice president of product management, Tableau Software. "Using the Aster MapReduce Platform native SQL interface, Tableau helps end-users easily unlock their big data assets and gives people an easy interface that anyone can use. Deployment is a simple point-and-click connection to the Aster MapReduce Platform. In minutes, IT and business people alike can analyze and visualize their business like never before."

Aster MapReduce Appliance and Teradata-Aster Adaptor

The new Aster MapReduce Appliance delivers hardware and software together in a pre-configured and optimized environment that is tuned for big data analysis. Running on proven Teradata hardware, and linearly scalable, the Aster MapReduce Appliance expands the Teradata Integrated Analytics Portfolio to include patented SQL-MapReduce analytic processing.

The Aster MapReduce Appliance is the first product to be developed based on the Aster technology since Teradata announced in April it had acquired Aster Data Systems, Inc. The purpose-built Aster architecture was specifically developed to handle complex data types that do not fit neatly into rows and columns. It uses massively parallel processing software and embedded MapReduce analytic processing to perform advanced data analysis of multi-structured data on a very large scale.

"Our industry-leading customers have found tremendous value in new multi-structured data that was previously too difficult to analyze, or took too long to analyze at scale. We expect more companies will capitalize on the value of an integrated and optimized platform with this new Aster MapReduce Appliance," said Randy Lea, vice president for the Aster Data Center of Innovation, Teradata. "The Aster MapReduce Appliance will also be integrated into the Teradata Analytical Ecosystem providing query management, system management, and data synchronization between Teradata and Aster platforms.

Increasingly, organizations are extending the reach of their big data analysis beyond a 'point-in-time' analytic inquiry made by a data science specialist into a recurring, iterative process distributed broadly to the business. This usage scenario has implications for integration into the enterprise analytic architecture that Teradata has addressed with delivery of the new Teradata-Aster Adaptor that supports high-speed data transfer between Aster and Teradata systems. This allows customers to discover insights from new multi-structured data in Aster and easily operationalize them with Teradata to transform their business and improve results.

"Companies are looking for a way to leverage and extend the value of their investments in data warehousing by including big data analytics. The Teradata-Aster Adaptor enables them to get insights from all their traditional and diverse data," said Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs, Teradata.

Available in early 2012, these products together bring to millions of users—both existing business intelligence users, as well as emerging data scientists within organizations—the ability to integrate big data analytics with an enterprise's existing business processes and information technology investments.

Relevant Links

How traditional and multi-structured data warehousing fit together in the enterprise (image) Digital Marketing Optimization (video)

Social Network Analysis (video)  

"Start Making Sense of all that New Data" (news release)

About Aster Data

The Teradata Aster MapReduce Platform is the market-leading big data analytics solution. This analytic platform embeds MapReduce analytic processing for deeper insights on new data sources and multi-structured data types to deliver analytic capabilities with breakthrough performance and scalability. Teradata's solution utilizes Aster's patented SQL-MapReduce to parallelize the processing of data and applications and deliver rich analytic insights at scale. For more information, visit www.asterdata.com or for more about Teradata, visit teradata.com.

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 integration and insight to empower organizations to achieve competitive advantage. Visit teradata.com for details.

Teradata is a trademark or registered trademark of Teradata Corporation in the United States and other countries.

SOURCE Teradata