Teradata prioritized cloud and fostered partnerships to become a platform company: CEO McMillan

US-headquartered Teradata Corp., an analytics data platform company has introduced fresh strategies focussing on cloud technology and collaborations to revamp global enterprises. In an interview, president and chief executive Steve McMillan highlighted the firm’s AI innovation efforts and the strategic significance of the Indian market. Edited excerpts:

You took over during challenging times amid Covid-19. What has changed in terms of doing business in the last 3-4 years?
When I joined Teradata in June 2020, it was a prominent player in enterprise data warehousing and analytics, but had not pivoted towards cloud. My main role was to lead the transformation toward embracing cloud technology. Our aim was to build a strategy on two pillars: cloud-first and partner-first. We prioritized the cloud and fostered partnerships to become a platform company. This shift required a global approach to implementation, impacting our workforce of over 6,000 employees worldwide, with a substantial presence in India which is now our largest region in terms of employee headcount.

How has your growth been and how has the India team contributed to your global operations?
Teradata India has shown significant growth in recent years, expanding its presence in the market, increasing its customer base. We have seen a definitive transformation in terms of analytics and data-driven strategy for enterprises in India. Our employees are based in Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru and others. Our focus is to deliver expertise and bringing innovative ways of generating actionable insights from data. Our differentiation factor is how we operationalize these technologies and deliver the best to our clients. As we value long-term customer relationship, we would continue to focus on creating more momentum and traction with the targeted customer and prospect organisations. In India, our prime focus will be on verticals like BFSI, healthcare, infrastructure, manufacturing and government. This is where most transformation is happening. We look to investing in a team of experts to go after the verticals.

How are you integrating AI and analytics into your offerings? Which projects are involved in Gen AI?
AI is becoming a leading technology in today’s world. Our goal was to create a top-tier multi-cloud data platform for enterprise analytics, integrating generative AI and language models seamlessly. The team in India played a crucial role in achieving this. Recently, our Mumbai team showcased the integration of language models on teradata.com. This combination of cloud technologies and AI services has led to significant growth in our cloud business, from $50 million to more than $520 million. We established multi-cloud capability, catering to advanced AI use cases.

The market is teeming with players in data analytics, warehousing. Why would enterprises go to Teradata to buy their solutions?
Organizations face challenges for data and analytics, such as operating at an enterprise scale, integrating data across organization. Teradata excels in collaborating with companies to implement solutions for millions of customers. We specialize in deploying advanced data science models at scale, outperforming peers in efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It is crucial as AI solutions are projected to consume a significant amount of electricity in future. Teradata offers exceptional performance at competitive prices compared to rivals.

Can you tell us about your integration with Microsoft Fabric?
Our first server-less AI-ML engine on cloud, is integrated into Microsoft Fabric and Fabric’s multi-cloud data lake, and is designed to accelerate cost-effective AI innovation. It will be available from Q2. By integrating with Fabric, users can access large amounts of data and have the flexibility to experiment with AI initiatives. Teradata AI Unlimited for Microsoft Fabric expands the end-to-end analytics capabilities already present on the platform. It allows customers to explore, test, and implement AI projects on a limitless scale. The service can be linked with the Microsoft Azure OpenAI service to utilize large language models (LLMs) and quickly implement any model trained by Azure. The transparent consumption-based model enables easy tracking and management of costs, which is crucial during experimental phases. Users can seamlessly transition from prototype to production in Vantage Cloud, Teradata’s cloud analytics and data platform. My key takeaway: This offering empowers users to explore possibilities without concerns about rising costs and scalability challenges.