How to tell Teradata’s product lines apart
Once Netezza hit the market, Teradata had a classic “disruptive” price problem – it offered a high end product, at a high price, sporting lots of features that not all customers needed or were willing to pay for. Teradata has at times slashed prices in competitive situations, but there are obvious risks to that, especially when a customer already has a number of other Teradata systems for which it paid closer to full price.
This year, Teradata has introduced a range of products that flesh out its competitive lineup. There now are three mainstream Teradata offerings, plus two with more specialized applicability. Teradata no longer has to sell Cadillacs to customers on Corolla budgets.
But how do we tell the five Teradata product lines apart? The names are confusing, both in their hardware-vendor product numbers and their data-warehousing-dogma product names, especially since in real life Teradata products’ capabilities overlap. Indeed, Teradata executives freely admit that the Teradata Data Mart Appliance 551 can run smaller data warehouses, while the Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance 2550 is positioned in large part at what Teradata quite reasonably calls data marts.
When one looks past the difficulties of naming, Teradata’s product lineup begins to make more sense. Let’s start by considering the three main Teradata products. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Netezza, Pricing, Teradata | 14 Comments |
Oracle notes
I spent about six hours at Oracle today — talking with Andy Mendelsohn, Ray Roccaforte, Juan Loaiza, Cetin Ozbutun, et al. — and plan to write more later. For now, let me pass along a few quick comments. Read more
| Categories: Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Parallelization, Pricing, Storage, Theory and architecture | 10 Comments |
Vertica offers some more numbers
Eric Lai interviewed Dave Menninger of Vertica. Highlights included:
- $20 million in trailing revenue. Removing a single multi-million-dollar deal from the list, that’s a few hundred thousand dollars each for 50ish customers. At $100K or so per terabyte, that’s an average of several terabytes of user data each, or more depending on what you assume about discounting.
- Dave used a figure of $100K per terabyte of user data, down from the $150K Vertica has previously used.
| Categories: Data warehousing, Market share and customer counts, Pricing, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
A data warehouse pricing complication: Software vs. appliances
Juan Loaiza of Oracle disagrees with a number of my opinions. We plan to talk about some of that when I visit on Thursday, after Teradata Partners. 🙂 But I’d like to throw one of his ideas out there right now. Juan contends that comparisons of Oracle Exadata pricing are apt to be misleading because — among other reasons — Oracle licenses can be reused on other hardware, in ways that appliance software can not. (The same reasoning would of course apply to almost everybody else except Teradata and Netezza.) Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 2 Comments |
Greenplum pricing
Edit: Actually, this post is completely incorrect. The $20K/terabyte is for software only. So far, my attempts to get Greenplum to estimate hardware costs have been unsuccessful.
Greenplum’s Scott Yara was recently quoted citing a $20K/terabyte figure for Greenplum pricing. That naturally raises the question:
Greenplum charges around $20K/terabyte of what?
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Greenplum, Pricing | 4 Comments |
Oracle Database Machine and Exadata pricing: Part 2
My Oracle Database Machine and Exadata pricing spreadsheet has been updated. Specifically:
- The first page has been modestly altered to accommodate more chargeable software options, as per the discussion below.
- Accordingly, my new estimate for HP Oracle Database Machine list price is $5,546,000. Per-terabyte prices (user data) are $60K and $198K for the two configurations.
- There’s a whole new second page, for Exadata configurations smaller than a full Oracle Database Machine. Most of the work on that was done by Bence Arató of BI Consulting (Hungary), who graciously gave me permission to post it.
- The lowest per-terabyte Exadata price estimates are about 20% lower than for the full Oracle Database Machine. The difference is due mainly to eliminating Real Application Clusters for a single-node SMP machine, and secondarily to rounding down slightly on server hardware capacity. But these are rough estimates, as neither Bence nor I is a hardware pricing guy.
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 11 Comments |
Eric Lai on Oracle Exadata, and some addenda
Eric Lai offers a detailed FAQ on Oracle Exadata, including a good selection of links and quotes. I’d like to offer a few comments in response: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing | 4 Comments |
Oracle Exadata list pricing
The figures in this post have now been updated. There’s a new spreadsheet at that link as well.
I’ve been trying to figure out how much Oracle Exadata actually costs. My first cut comes up with prices of $58-190K/TB (user data), based on a total system price of $5,322,000, and user data figures of 28 and 92.4 TB for the two available sizes of disk drive. But of course there are a lot of uncertainties in these figures. You can use this spreadsheet (Edit: That’s the old one) to see where the final numbers come from, and to modify the estimates as you see fit. Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Oracle, Pricing | 10 Comments |
Jaspersoft numbers
I chatted Friday with marketing VP Nick Halsey of Jaspersoft, which is probably the most successful open source business intelligence company. (That’s based just anecdotally, on mentions. I’d put Pentaho #2, with Talend commonly getting mentioned along with the two BI vendors for its ETL.) I’ll go straight to the numbers, per Nick, before talking in a separate post about what Jaspersoft actually sells.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business intelligence, Jaspersoft, Market share and customer counts, Open source, Pricing | 7 Comments |
Exasol technical briefing
It took 5 ½ months after my non-technical introduction, but I finally got a briefing from Exasol’s technical folks (specifically, the very helpful Mathias Golombek and Carsten Weidmann). Here are some highlights: Read more