Data eye

Teradata makes discovery of Big Data connections easier and cheaper

Pro
(Source: IDGNS)

21 October 2014

Teradata, the big data analytics technology firm, has unveiled its Connection Analytics solution, to enable organisations to discover the relationships and influences between people, products and processes.

Connection Analytics, powered by the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform, was launched at the company’s Partners user conference in Nashville.

The analytics information that is gleaned from the new product is presented in a simple, pre-built, ready-to-run system, says Teradata, and it has won approval from analysts.

In the digital world, said Teradata, everything is connected but the connections may not always be obvious. Understanding the most important linkages within a network takes out the guesswork. Previously, analysing the flow of influence within and between networks had been difficult and expensive. It required specialised systems, unique skillsets and the stitching together of algorithms to discover these intertwined relationships.

Not seen before
Tony Baer, an analyst at Ovum, said: “This type of analytics has never before been available at enterprise scale for businesses. Connection Analytics delivers high-performance analytics that opens a new frontier for big data analytics.”

Connection Analytics promises to deliver advanced analytics across multiple disparate data sets at a massive scale, “without requiring a large investment of time, money, and resources”, trumpeted Teradata. It is built on the Teradata Aster Discovery Platform with the powerful MapReduce and Graph engines complemented by over 100 pre-built algorithms.

With Connection Analytics organisations are promised a system that can discover the kinds of linkages and relationships that make it possible to “design more effective marketing campaigns, predict fraud and customer churn more quickly, and deliver a superior customer experience”.

Scott Gnau, president of Teradata Labs, said: “Teradata has changed the game by combining next-generation analytic techniques like graph and machine learning, and then put them in the hands of business users across the enterprise.

“Connection Analytics delivers the advanced analytics data scientists demand and the usability to extend this capability to business analysts across the enterprise.”

It is this kind of technology that has generated speculation that Teradata is ripe for acquisition. HP, for instance, is believed to be circling the company, as it wants to further bolster the capabilities of its Autonomy offering, which is already a leader in solutions for analysing unstructured datasets.

Acquisition possible
HP CEO Meg Whitman recently said the company was again in a position to consider takeover options, helped by a near-record cash pile, despite a faltering PC business.

In other product enhancements to its big data analytics offering announced in Nashville, Teradata revealed engineering advancements to the Teradata Database. These deliver increased analytic performance and system efficiency through new memory and CPU optimisations.

The enhancements, said Teradata, strengthen its approach to in-memory computing and enable customers to automatically realise the greatest benefit from their investment in memory.

“Teradata is relentlessly dedicated to engineering a smarter, simpler way to leverage memory and CPU to drive performance,” said Gnau. “Blindly throwing additional memory at a problem has diminishing returns, particularly when it comes to big data. Teradata’s sophisticated approach automatically and efficiently places the right data in-memory to get the performance they need for the best cost.”

In Teradata Database 15.10, Teradata Intelligent Memory will be enhanced to reduce the load on memory bandwidth, improve CPU efficiency, reduce I/O to disk, and improve overall system efficiency.

The improvements come as Teradata is expected to announce this week further company commitments to developing products around the open source Hadoop data processing system.

The enhancements to the Teradata Database will be available in the first half of 2015.

 

 

Antony Savvas, IDG News Service

Read More:


Back to Top ↑

TechCentral.ie