Teradata IntelliSphere — a unified software portfolio for a unified analytical ecosystem

Many things in life are simply better together — Laurel and Hardy, fish and chips and One Direction, for example. The idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts applies not only to food, boy bands and the best comedy duo of the 20th century — I’ll contend that it also applies to enterprise data integration software.

The IT engineer or business analyst faces a plethora of choices of tools and technologies to help them ingest, access, deploy, and manage analytics and data in their environment. No one tool addresses all of the data integration use cases. What’s needed is a toolkit of capabilities that can be used together to develop solutions to drive value from large-scale, modern, complex analytical ecosystems. A tool kit is, of course, better than the sum of its parts — it provides ready access to a range of tools, enabling an agile approach to solving problems on the fly.

At Teradata, we recognize this need, so we’ve gathered together all of our software for orchestrating a modern analytical ecosystem into an easy-to-consume toolkit called Teradata IntelliSphere™. This software portfolio provides organizations with the foundational capabilities needed to support compelling integrated data solutions across diverse analytical ecosystems.

Many companies are adopting Teradata Everywhere™, which brings the Teradata Analytics Platform to multiple public clouds, managed cloud and on-premises environments. IntelliSphere complements Teradata Everywhere™, delivering the comprehensive set of capabilities required to ingest, access, deploy and manage a flexible analytical ecosystem.

With the IntelliSphere software suite, line of business users and IT organizations are able to integrate data across a broad ecosystem by taking advantage of four core capabilities:

• Ingest: Using IntelliSphere, companies can easily capture and distribute high-volume data streams, with ready-to-run elastic architecture and quick access for business-critical analysis.
• Access: Companies gain easy access to data stored anywhere, even in a hybrid cloud or heterogeneous technology environment.
• Deploy: Deploy applications and analytic models for easy user access and enterprise collaboration.
• Manage: Management software allows for ad hoc data movement, as well as ongoing monitoring and control via an operational interface.

The new offering simplifies the process of purchasing and licensing the existing ecosystem software products from Teradata. With IntelliSphere, customers are now able to purchase all of our existing analytical ecosystem products on a subscription basis under new licensing terms that allow them to be used in an unlimited fashion across all of the Teradata platforms they own.

The software bundle includes established ecosystem software such as:

• Teradata Listener: For real time data streaming ingest into Teradata.
• Teradata Data Mover: For high-performance data movement between Teradata platforms.
• Teradata QueryGrid: For virtualizing queries across heterogeneous data management platforms such as Hadoop, Teradata Aster and other Teradata systems.
• Teradata Unity: For providing high availability and data synchronization between Teradata database systems.
• Teradata AppCenter: For deploying, executing and sharing analytical apps across an organization that accesses data in a broad range of Teradata and third-party data management solutions.
• Teradata Hybrid Cloud Manager: For seamlessly transferring workloads from on-premises systems to public clouds, available by the end of 2017.
• Teradata Data Lab: For creating exploratory data analysis sandboxes that can span hybrid cloud environments.
• Teradata Data Stream Extension: For enabling backup and restore to and from a range of enterprise-grade, third-party backup solutions.
• Teradata Multi-system Viewpoint: For managing and monitoring a heterogeneous set of data platforms.
• Teradata Ecosystem Manager: For setting up workflows to manage key data transformation and loading tasks.

The software portfolio is offered via a one-year or three-year subscription, and is also available on an on-demand basis on the public cloud. Also, subscribers will be automatically entitled to download and deploy brand new capabilities as they are added to IntelliSphere.

I believe the most successful vendors in the data management space must offer broad, cross-platform and scalable data integration solutions that empower companies to break down the data silos that exist within their IT environments. Organizations that are able to eliminate these data silos are solving problems faster, gaining new flexibility and realizing big benefits. These companies come to see an integrated analytical ecosystem as invaluable to their respective data management and analytics strategy and are investigating additional use cases around data exploration, machine learning and prescriptive analysis.

Our customers care more about business outcomes and less about the technologies that enable them. Teradata’s goal is to support the need for data-driven insights by providing seamless, timely and cost-effective access to analytics regardless of where the data resides. We’re able to help our customers achieve this by enabling new analytic solutions based on the broad ecosystem integration capabilities of Teradata IntelliSphere.

All in all, I think our customers and IntelliSphere are better together.