Imagine driving down an unfamiliar road that has many twists and turns. If you are constantly looking in the rearview mirror, you might miss a jog in the road and come to an abrupt halt. But if you look ahead and anticipate changes in direction, you may discover an exciting vista that features sights you never dreamed existed.

Innovation is like that. Going off the beaten path may be a bit uncomfortable and even risky, but the rewards can be plentiful.

Teradata's path began with a unique parallel computing paradigm, offloading from mainframes onto microcomputers at a time when personal computers didn't exist. It was a disruptive approach because we took what had been the focus of enterprise-class computing and did it with microprocessors.

Virtualization was the next big leap. It allowed Teradata to take advantage of high-volume, commoditized microcomputing components and move away from building custom hardware. We used standard components and virtualized software to run on that hardware. Everyone is talking about virtual now; we did it in 1995. The result was Teradata's UNIX (MP-RAS) solution.

And we keep moving ahead. In the last two years, Teradata adopted Linux as the operating system to run its most critical customer workloads. Leveraging Linux, Teradata has created a system that is supportable, stable, scalable and extendable. We provide these critical attributes, which are essential to innovation, back to the open source community. The reward for Teradata and our customers is a huge performance and feature advantage.

In high tech, you've got to focus on a couple of key areas to drive your investment in innovation—customer and market requirements, and embracing disruption—or it's "game over."

Those two areas are essential not only for Teradata but also for its customers. Teradata's customers understand the business at the most detailed level and use this detailed intelligence to build predictive models, which optimize decisions on driving strategy. Organizations can then outwit their competitors and shake up the status quo. Working collaboratively with such forward-thinking customers has also helped us develop some of our best solutions.

Down the road
We're always looking to the next advancement. Even as Teradata Database 13.0 is being released, R&D is looking to the future of analytics. It's not about the next big release; rather, it's how we think about changing the market again.

Leveraging the rising tide of non-traditional data, such as text from a call center or GPS coordinates, presents yet another new opportunity to innovate. Developing scalable solutions to store such unstructured data is only the beginning. What's most interesting are the types of analytics that can be done with these new kinds of data. Teradata is ready for them. Are you? T

Scott Gnau is the chief development officer of Teradata.

Photography by James Aranovsky

Teradata Magazine-December 2008