Teradata partners with Microsoft to add Vantage data platform to Azure

Customers of both companies will benefit from this combination of “best-in-class capabilities” that include an integration with Power BI.

Teradata announced on Wednesday an expanded partnership to add the Vantage data analysis capabilities to Microsoft Azure. The new offering will integrate Vantage with Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics and 60 other Azure data services.

Teradata Vantage on Azure has been part of the Azure ecosystem for some time, including more than 60 Azure data services.

Sid Nag, a Gartner Research vice president, said the two vendors are combining best-in-class capabilities to bring a best-of-breed solution to address specific use cases such as data and analytics.

“Cloud providers are constantly partnering with other independent software vendors and other providers, especially with the increased adoption of multicloud that requires best-in-class componentry from multiple public cloud providers to service and enable the complex workloads of today that are being moved to the cloud,” he said.

SEE: Lenovo announces new on-prem, high-performance computing-as-a-service product

Alexander Wurm, principal analyst for database and data warehouse coverage at Nucleus Research, said this integration creates a “one-stop-shop” for enterprise data and cloud applications by combining Teradata’s in-database analytics with Microsoft’s suite of PowerBI applications.

“This strategic initiative allows Teradata Vantage and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics to keep pace with competitors like Snowflake and Databricks who have a head start with their 2018 partnership to pair data warehousing with big data analytics,” he said.

Judson Althoff, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft, said in a press release that the partnership’s combined data, artificial intelligence and cloud capabilities will help teams make data-driven decisions faster.

“Turning data into business-critical insights has become essential for organizations committed to serving evolving market needs with resilience, sustainability and efficiency,” he said.

Todd Cione, chief revenue officer at Teradata, said in a press release that this expanded partnership reflects a commitment to helping customers execute cloud strategies and solve data analytics challenges.

Customers of both vendors will benefit from this new partnership, according to Wurm, with Microsoft customers gaining improved scale-out capabilities with Teradata while Teradata customers enhance scale-up capabilities with Microsoft’s serverless options for Azure Synapse and Apache Spark instances.

“With these combined functionalities, customers can eliminate cluster provisioning and tuning processes and achieve usage-based pricing across their analytics infrastructure,” he said.

Also, Wurm noted, Teradata customers can use Microsoft’s implementation of Apache Spark to enhance big data analytics.

“This version of Apache Spark comes complete with an enhanced shuffle service to align data and dynamic partition pruning to remove unnecessary data during task execution,” he said.

The new partnership offers these new services, according to Teradata:

• Low-risk migration path to modernize data analytics
• Support for end-to-end data integration and management
• Higher query volumes and diverse workloads
• Sub-second response times