Teradata: Expanding Its Oracle Partnership

On March 5th Teradata announced an expanded worldwide relationship with Oracle. The expanded relationship is designed to promote enhanced enterprise-wide analytics, enabling joint customers to gain valuable business insights from greater amounts of detailed data.

Analytical Summary

► Current Perspective: Positive on Teradata and Oracle’s expanded partnership, between as it will facilitate the ability of users of Teradata’s high-end database technology to deploy Oracle’s extensive portfolio of business intelligence technology.

► Vendor Importance: Moderate to high to Teradata as it serves to further position its proprietary database and data warehousing technology as being open to major third party data integration and business intelligence technology. Moderate to high to Oracle as it demonstrates that its BI technology does not necessarily require an underlying Oracle database.

► Market Impact: Moderate on the database technology market where Teradata is an established and respected, if perhaps niche, vendor that competes directly with Oracle. It provides yet another example of the two data management competitors working cooperatively to their mutual advantage.

Recommended Competitor Actions

► BI vendors including Business Objects (now part of SAP), Cognos (now part of IBM), Information Builders, MicroStrategy, SAS and SPSS should point to their own partnerships with Teradata and remind prospects that Oracle is certainly not Teradata’s only BI partner.

► In general, established database vendors like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle with focus on the cadre of BI partners that work with their databases while data warehouse appliance vendors will point to the BI vendors that have been certified to work with their appliances.

► Traditional database vendors will also highlight how their database can support both operational and analytical environments while attempting to only somewhat sarcastically position Teradata as an overpriced data warehouse appliance.

Recommended End User / Customer Actions

► Prospects evaluating Teradata for their enterprise data warehousing technology should recognize that many BI tools and solutions can be used with Teradata, even those from some of its direct competitors.

► These customer bases for Oracle’s acquired Siebel (i.e., Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition is based on Siebel Business Analytics) and Hyperion analytical technology, should recognize that by partnering with companies like Teradata, Oracle is taking steps to demonstrate that it is supporting their products and not making it dependent on an underlying Oracle database.

► In general, prospects considering high-end data warehouse implementations should recognize that Teradata is not the only game in town and consider both traditional database vendors as well as the offerings from data warehouse appliance vendors.

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Microsoft Expands SaaS Footprint with Collaboration Tools

On March 2nd, from its annual Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference, Microsoft announced that the company will offer Microsoft Online Services to businesses of all sizes, expanding its software-plus-services strategy. In support of this announcement, the company unveiled a limited beta trial of the new services: Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. The new services are scheduled to be generally available to businesses of all sizes in the second half of the year.

Analytical Summary

► Current Perspective: Positive on Microsoft for expanding its Microsoft Online Software (MOS) platform with a beta release of two single-instance, multi-tenant software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings focused on collaboration and messaging. This announcement significantly strengthens the company’s software-plus-service market strategy, creating an SMB-capable SaaS correlate to the firm’s existing managed (dedicated) services for collaboration and messaging.

► Vendor Importance: Very high to Microsoft, because the firm needed to respond to a very strong trend toward subscription-based, hosted software as a means of reaching enterprise customers that are unable to afford or maintain on-premise equipment in support of basic corporate communications. Microsoft’s beta release of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online is important, as it also helps the vendor counter recent, high-profile moves made by IBM to create SaaS-based collaboration solutions for the mid-market.

► Market Impact: High on the application and data delivery market, which is expanding rapidly into SaaS-based solutions, either as direct offerings or as indirect, supportive offerings for SaaS providers. Microsoft’s Online Software solution, though limited to Exchange, SharePoint, and LiveMeeting (an existing service), straddles both approaches and gives Microsoft yet another entry point for a SaaS program that can leverage the firm’s large customer base to drive its integration-as-a-service (IaaS) offering (BizTalk Services) and its line-of-business offerings (Dynamics).

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Red Hat Ramps Up SOA Portfolio and Practices

On February 14th Red Hat announced the global availability of the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform. The solution provides service-oriented architecture (SOA), application, and business-process integration capabilities in a single, easy-to-consume enterprise distribution. The firm also announced the sponsorship of three new open source community projects expected to expand the JBoss Enterprise Middleware portfolio in the future as part of its Enterprise Acceleration initiative. These new product initiatives include BEA Tuxedo-compatible transaction processing, SOA governance, and enhanced systems management. In addition, Red Hat announced the "Enterprise Acceleration" initiative designed to help its enterprise customers accelerate their transition to a next-generation, open source middleware architecture based on JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Analytical Summary

► Current Perspective: Positive on Red Hat’s series of announcements made at JBoss World. The company has capitalized upon and responded to a number of timely market opportunities surrounding Oracle’s acquisition of BEA as well as WSO2 and MuleSource’s recently introduced governance solutions. More generally, the firm has strengthened its overall SOA go-to-market position through the introduction of a bundled SOA suite of products, a number of new open source projects, and the introduction of an ISV and enterprise customer-enabling initiative (the Enterprise Acceleration Program). With these moves, Red Hat intends to reach the lofty goal of capturing 50% of all enterprise middleware workloads by 2015.

► Vendor Importance: Very high to Red Hat, because while the firm possesses a number of platforms in support of its portals, telecom services deployment, application servers, and data services, it lacked an integrated platform targeting horizontal SOA solutions – a condition rectified by the release of Red Hat Enterprise SOA Platform, which is expected to reach general availability within 30 days. This platform will allow Red Hat to offer a supported ESB (previously, its ESB was not available with a support contract), increasing the firm’s ability to aggressively compete with pure-play ESB vendors in the open source market, including WS02, MuleSource, Sun, and IONA.

► Market Impact: High on the SOA market, which is experiencing a perfect storm in which open source players have garnered a great deal of market share on the application server and ESB end of the SOA spectrum, while larger, closed source players have undergone a series of consolidating acquisitions. Despite the embryonic nature of some of the announcements made by Red Hat at JBoss World, the firm has further solidified its position as the leading pure open source vendor within the SOA market and it stands well positioned to capitalize upon this perfect storm over both the short and long term.

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