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SAS and Teradata Show Their Hand in Vegas
So I’m at the Teradata Partners conference last week in Vegas and, after the requisite conference theatrics — I’ve come to expect hydraulics at any vendor event with over 3000 attendees — down comes Mike Koehler, he having recently taken the helm of the newly-independent Teradata, talking about his company’s plans for the coming year. Then there’s the inevitable dry ice sublimation — I’ve come to expect dry ice at any vendor event with over 3000 attendees — through which appears Dr. Jim Goodnight, the founder and leader of the venerable SAS. What gives?
What gives, indeed. The two companies have sometimes been at odds. Marketing product managers at a large bank we work with insist that they can do everything they need to do in SAS tables, extracting their data from the Teradata system and manipulating it in SAS datasets — and not enriching the data warehouse with the results. The product managers wanted their own copies of the 8-terabyte data set, essentially putting the kibosh on the bank’s goal of “single version of the truth.”
SAS intellectual capital was tied up in its tools, Teradata’s in its database. Now the two companies have announced aformal partnership. There’s a peanut butter cup analogy in here someplace.
There was a lot of speculation about the drivers for the partnership. “Better performance, for one thing,” one smart SAS rep told me. High-speed, embedded analytical applications seemed to be the theme. On the Teradata side, the buzz was more about the application suite. “We’ve relied on a range of partnerships to provide a pretty broad set of functions,” a Teradata manager explained. “SAS offers a suite of tools beyond statistical analysis.”
Soon SAS analytics will run locally on the Teradata platform. It appears that the might of SAS has convinced Teradata to support non-SQL based processing, and non-Teradata database functions being run inside Teradata’s engine. SAS processing can in turn capitalize on the performance advantages of Teradata.
But in the longer term, the dark horse might turn out to be data quality. Historically Teradata has relied on its customers having an incumbent data quality solution, essentially bolted-on to the Teradata load utilities. While not yet part of the two companies’ formal plan, embracing SAS progeny DataFlux and its data cleansing and matching capabilities might well be the partnership’s ace-in-the-hole.
2 Responses to “SAS and Teradata Show Their Hand in Vegas”
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It certainly was an interesting announcement. One of the things that strikes me is the increased focus it brings to embedded analytics - that is to say analytic models executed as part of automating operational decisions. This has been an area of some interest for Teradata for a while and I think the work they announced to bring SAS into the engine will only continue this trend.
JT
James Taylor
Author, with Neil Raden, of Smart (Enough) Systems
James: Thanks for your remarks. I’m not only excited to see the fruits of the partnership, I’m excited to see how the two respective companies position these new capabilities as business solutions. There is already some buzz from competitors in the vein of “We already do that.” Should be fun to watch!
Jill