01
About The Book
2019 marked Teradata's fourth decade of leadership and innovation in the field of business intelligence and decision science. However, while the company itself is well known, its journey from a concept in the 1960s to today's incarnation is not. As we approach Teradata's 45th birthday, it is the right time to tell the story of Teradata’s legacy and its relevance to the continued development of data and analytics.
The Teradata story is being shaped and re-shaped by our conversations with founders, employees, customers and industry players. As each conversation takes place, new themes emerge that need to make their way into the book. We'll only know what the book will look like once we publish, until then here's our latest point of view about the structure and narrative flow of the book. For a more current view of the memes that emerge from the most recent conversations, then take a look at the Blog or to read the memories that others have contributed, then go to Share Your Story
Chapter 1
The Path to 1979
The path to Teradata's incorporation in 1979 is in itself a story providence, accidental connections and a relatively young industry unable to cope with the data created by its own systems. The computer industry was led by IBM and other mainframe companies that weren't thinking about helping companies access their own data productively. Despite the dominance of Big Blue and the other dinosaurs, the computing industry was changing as companies like Apple, Intel, Oracle and Digital were challenging the mainframe hegemony. Despite the industry's scepticism that it would work, Ted Codd’s Relational Model would make data easier to store and retrieve, a perfect tool for emerging management practices that extolled the virtues of data driven decision making. The newly formed Teradata Corporation was the nexus for a viable solution to solve the new data challenge. Jack Shemer was the lightening rod that brought together the right people at the right time to create a new machine that would make data collection and analysis easy and fast, able to perform at scale and grow with the needs of the business. In 1979, a few people in a garage in Brentwood California laid the path for a new computing paradigm.
Chapter 2
Betting On The Jockey
Teradata’s story had already begun in the 1960s when Jack Shemer saw that, one day, enterprises would need a specialist data base computer to manage increasing amounts of data being generated by business systems. As he journeyed from GE to Citibank’s TTI subsidiary via Xerox PARC, Jack developed his concept further and along the way found Dave Hartke, Jerry Modes, Phil Neches and others, who could help make his idea a reality. But significant investment dollars would be needed to build a new company and a unique technology. Such a radically new approach to collecting and analysing data would put off many investors, especially as IBM was not leveraging their own R&D in this field, but those that stepped forward to back the enterprise were making a conscious decision to put a bet on the brains behind Teradata just as much as the promise of the Data Base Computer itself. As Brentwood Associates’ Kip Hagopian would later say, they were backing the jockey, not the horse. With funding, the critical job of assembling a talented team to build the DBC could begin, and the all important steps to translate design into reality could be made.
Chapter 2
The Machine That Changed History
Before Teradata threw its hat into the ring, there had been a number of attempts to design and build a data base computer. The vast majority failed. Those that did succeed commercially were highly specialised scientific systems such as the Cray Supercomputer, powerful but with a very technical user interface and not fit for purpose in the world of business. When it shipped its first production machine in 1984, Teradata changed all of that. Succeeding when others had fallen by the wayside, the talents that Teradata had attracted were able to achieve those breakthroughs necessary to engineer the hardware and software required to build a parallel data base computer system that was both powerful and easy to use. The impact of the DBC should not be underestimated, it was a triumph of holistic design, striking the right balance between proprietary and commodity components, brute force and simplicity. The DBC's success helped to create a new market, solely focused on collecting, storing and analysing data to extract insight and value from it.
Chapter 4
A Family Affair
It's true to say that a clever technology and ambition doesn't always combine to create a company that lasts for 40+ years. Teradata’s longevity has been, in part, the result of the cultural legacy that its founders established from the beginning. They felt that it was important that each individual understood what was required of them, but also that they should feel part of the Teradata ‘family’, that everyone was there for each other. With a purpose driven and values based culture already beating at it's heart, the founders took it one step further as they recognised that the friends and families of Teradatans would bare the brunt of the devotional obsession employees would need to get the system developed, built and shipped. Every individual that joined the Teradata family adopted that culture and perpetuated it long after the founders had moved on, showing the strength of its core values and the bond people had with them and therefore each other. The Teradata founders created a company based on a guiding philosophy that instilled a fundamental purpose and a shared responsibility for all employees to embrace that, at the same time, stimulated a dynamic approach to 'getting the right things done' for the company, it's employees and it's customers.
Chapter 5
Partners In Progress
From it's earliest incarnation, Teradata was focused on making a product that was not only relevant in solving a customer’s problems, but also simple to use, organising data like people thought rather than how computers worked. To achieve that clarity of vision, Teradata involved prospective customers to fast track the development process from the beginning, in effect crowd sourcing some elements of the product. Some prospective customers made their own mainframe systems available for development and testing. The Partners Programme would result in key software features being included into the product that the founders had not envisaged and accelerated Teradata's own understanding and appreciation of what would make their product successful. The ‘relationships’ that formed between customer personnel and the Teradata R&D organisation was a game changer for the company and the customers that used it’s technology. That approach didn't stay in the back room world of coders and architects, Teradata put the same customer centric philosophy at the heart of the sales and support organisations, aiming to ensure buyer satisfaction long after the sale was made. Teradata bucked the trend that pervaded tech companies in the 1980's, whereby getting the next customer was of paramount importance. For Teradata, the last customer was as important as the next, establishing Teradata's loyalty to their own customers and their needs.
Chapter 6
Change Before You Have To
When Teradata occupied the top spot in Electronic Business’s list of the 100 fastest growing companies in 1990, revenues had zoomed to $224m and its systems were powering insight development at many Fortune 500 companies. Teradata’s success was in part because of it’s unique technology but also because Teradata’s leadership team were constantly looking to make the right changes to ensure the company’s success. And so, with an eye to the future, TEQUEL was replaced by SQL. Ken Simonds was added to the leadership team to take the company forward, building a financially stable business and taking on IBM in it's own heartland. The International Division was started before Teradata was firmly established in its own backyard and strategic partnerships were struck with the likes of NCR to develop new hardware platforms. Teradata’s adaptability has been an important characteristic in its development and continued survival, and in the 1990's the resilience born from that adaptability would be needed more than ever.
Chapter 7
The Fall and Rise of Teradata
As the 1980’s came to a close, Teradata needed a new generation of computer system to match its ambitious software development roadmap. At the same time, NCR needed to a new generation of a mainframe class system in order to remain competitive. A joint venture was created between NCR and Teradata to pool their design and engineering talent to create one ‘next generation’ platform that would serve both their needs. AT&T’s acquisition of NCR in the middle of 1991 changed everything, potentially leaving NCR and Teradata without the next gen platform they both needed. When NCR subsequently bought Teradata later in 1991, the market assumed that Teradata’s software would become marginalised in favour of NCR’s other database partners. And, for a while, it seemed that the market was right. That is until Lars Nyberg was appointed CEO of NCR in 1995 and he subsequently made Teradata a strategic brand within the NCR portfolio. Teradata has been on the rise ever since, achieving independence from NCR in 2007, and continuing to strengthen and adapt it’s technology for a fast changing, analytically driven world that it helped to create back in 1979.
Chapter 8
Disruption, Cooperation & Competition
Few technology brands are able to claim that for 40 years or so, they still dominate the market sector they helped to create and popularise. Teradata should be ranked alongside the likes of Intel and Apple as one of the few. When it was released, the Teradata system disrupted the continuing trend to centralise data processing on ever larger, more costly, mainframes running hierarchical data base management systems - a market sector dominated by IBM. Even IBM's competitors were locked into the IBM way, designing clones of IBM systems or creating a new product that whose architecture slotted nicely into the IBM universe. Few mavericks saw things differently and went on to be successful, Teradata was one of the few. Teradata’s success laid the foundation for the Business Intelligence market that also, inevitably, attracted companies such as Redbrick, Sequent, Netezza, Sun, Tandem and HP who wished to displace it. Others like IBM, Oracle and Sybase would attempt to fight off Teradata's challenge by trying to add parallel processing functionality to their existing products, with mixed success. Other software companies like SAP would at some time see the symbiotic nature of a relationship with Teradata as beneficial, but at another time would decide to compete head on. More recently, the marketing hype around so called 'Big Data' platforms threatened to marginalise Teradata technology despite their obvious shortcomings. All in all, Teradata has been able to shrug off the competition and maintain it’s leadership position on merit. As Alan Chow, one time head of Teradata R&D, has observed, that for 40 years Teradata technology has often been imitated but never bettered.
Chapter 9
Teradata's Global Impact
Teradata systems have always been state of the art. Powerful and yet easy to manage and use, Teradata technology has been utilised to tame 'big data' challenges since the first production machine hit the streets in 1984, right through to today’s emphasis on Artificial Intelligence, IoT and Cloud. Through the decades, insights derived from data stored and processed on Teradata systems have supported important breakthroughs in understanding how the world works, such as: reducing fraud, fighting crime, improving healthcare, optimising business processes, increasing revenues, designing smart cities, streamlining logistics, enhancing customer experiences, protecting the vulnerable, predicting the future. Teradata has enabled it's customers to continuously push the boundaries of data driven decision making for 40 plus years, benefiting government agencies and commercial enterprises, but also the day-to-day lives of ordinary people.