News

Teradata Tackles Hadoop Skills Shortage with Managed Services

• By David Ramel
• October 22, 2015

Among many announcements at its user conference, Teradata offered managed Hadoop services through its Think Big subsidiary to address the lack of skilled developers needed by enterprises to benefit from their Big Data analytics efforts.

"Many organizations have found that it is relatively easy to download Hadoop software for free, and then load their data," Teradata said. "What is far more difficult is to gain a competitive advantage from analyzing Big Data. The problem is compounded as a result of the current shortage of talented individuals with Hadoop skills."

To address what some have termed a "Big Data paralysis," Think Big Managed Services for Hadoop will help organizations ensure that Hadoop data lakes are available, optimized and secure, the company said. "The consulting services will help organizations tackle the complexity of data lake management and take full advantage of Big Data," the company said.

The Think Big consulting teams will field engineers, developers and data scientists to provide operations and application support for open source technologies such as Spark, Kafka, NoSQL and Apache Hadoop-based distributions from enterprise-oriented vendors such as Cloudera Inc., Hortonworks Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc.

"A concise search on a popular career development site shows more than 26,000 job openings requiring some level of Hadoop knowledge or experience, but it's very unlikely these positions will be filled any time soon," Teradata quoted analyst Robin Bloor as saying. "I consult with organizations all the time that have embarked on a Big Data adventure, but lack guidance to make their journey successful. Think Big Managed Services for Hadoop provide that guidance for administration and development."

New Big Data Analytic Platform Offerings
In a bevy of other announcements, Teradata also shipped two enhanced analytic platforms named Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6800 and the Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform 1800.

"Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse 6800 runs the most demanding analytic workloads that require the highest performance, most consistent query response times, and ability to support thousands of concurrent users, hundreds of applications, and massive volumes of data," the company said in a statement. "It is the data warehouse at the core of the Teradata Unified Data Architecture." That architecture offering follows the company's philosophy of unifying technology and integrating data in its analytic initiatives.

Along those lines, "The Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform 1800 is available at a cost-effective price of approximately $1,000 per terabyte of compressed data," the company said. "It enables customers to perform complex analytics at scale on a wide range of Big Data. Running on the Teradata Integrated Big Data Platform, the Teradata Database provides users access to data in many common formats, including XML, name-value pair, and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data from Web applications, sensors and Internet of Things-connected machines."

The company also announced Teradata Database-to-Presto software to let developers use cross-platform SQL queries to be initiated from Hadoop or the Teradata Database. In addition, Teradata claims it's the first company to streamline data exploration and analytics by integrating its Teradata Database, Teradata Aster Analytics and Hadoop into the single Teradata UDA Appliance.