Teradata Connect 2014 event

Teradata Corp. is rolling out a new solution for identifying relationships across different kinds of information that aims to take the data scientist out of the analytics equation and hurry business insights along. The launch comes as the growing competition from Hadoop pushes the company to expand beyond its data warehousing home turf in pursuit of additional revenue streams.

Connection Analytics, as the new offering is known, runs atop the Aster Discovery Platform that Teradata obtained with its acquisition of the competitor of the same name back in 2011. The software takes advantage of the graph capability, which makes it possible to store information in the form of objects and the relationships between them, to enable users to drill into those connections for a true-to-life view of the situation at hand.

That makes it easier to expose patterns about and among all kinds of data entities, from customers accessing a retail website through strategic social media accounts to malicious bots. And to help users spot more complex relationships that require further digging to uncover, Connection Analytics harnesses another key feature of the Aster Discovery Platform: the SQL-MapReduce framework.

The technology enables developers to write advanced functions in the language of Hadoop that would either take considerably more effort or be outright impossible to replicate in conventional structured query syntax. According to Teradata, that allows users to manipulate information in Aster environments with far greater granularity than would be afforded otherwise, making it possible to catch relationships that might have slipped through the cracks in the past.

To make it possible for everyday business users to exploit that functionality, Connection Analytics packs in over 100 built-in algorithms covering many of the the use cases that Teradata is targeting the software towards. That includes social media analytics, which identify the reasons customers jump ship and track fraudsters across accounts based on their activity patterns.

The launch marks a landmark expansion of Teradata’s capabilities, but the same time, it also holds the risk of alienating partners such as Novetta Solutions LLC, the recently funded Loggly Inc. and Alteryx Inc., which offer functionality covering many of the same areas as Connection Analytics. But that’s a tactical sacrifice the data warehousing giant is apparently willing to make to further its long-term strategic goal of remaining relevant in the Hadoop era, a challenge that it’s taking a multi-pronged approach to tackling with a combination of new solutions, professional services and acquisitions. The company has a fine line to walk in pursuing that vision.