Big Data warehouse giant Teradata Corp. looks like it’s switching its focus to hybrid cloud services and the Internet of Things, likely as part of an initiative to head off declining sales revenues in other parts of its business.

That much is clear after a slew of announcements on the first day of its Teradata Universe 2016 event in Hamburg, Germany, yesterday.

The headline announcement is Teradata’s new Global IoT Analytics unit within Teradata Labs, a new special ops team of data scientists, data engineers and software designers it likens to “the Navy SEALs of Internet of Things analytics”. That team will be tasked with creating new cloud-based solutions and services that are designed to simplify advanced analytics, database management and data movement for the IoT.

“The smartest people at Teradata are laser-focused on building the best technologies to power the Analytics of Things,” said Oliver Ratzesberger, president of Teradata Labs, in a statement. “With this announcement, we are making it easier for our customers to move sensor data around, optimize data management systems to deal with the massive volumes of data and run real-time, advanced analytics against streams of IoT data. We’re giving our customers powerful tools and technologies to analyze IoT data for new insights, applications and use cases.”

Among their first tasks, Teradata’s IoT Navy SEALs helped to build the Teradata Aster Scoring software developer’s kit (SDK) in the company’s new Aster Analytics 6.21 solution. The SDK operates in the runtime environment on analytical models built atop the Aster database, allowing developers to build complex analytic models that can be deployed to IoT data centers, edge servers and public clouds.

Teradata has also extended the IoT capabilities of its Apache Kafka based Teradata Listener solution for following multiple streams of sensor and IoT data and propagating the data into multiple platforms in an analytical ecosystem. It’s now touting new connectors built by its Global IoT Analytics team that make it easier to collect and distribute streaming sensor data for analysis.

The Global IoT Analytics team’s next challenge will be to apply advanced analytics techniques and machine learning technology to DevOps and system administration tasks. Doing so, they hope to solve complex problems around performance and workload congestion.

Some of the new offerings to look out for include an early warning detection system that uses predictive analytics to detect and fix issues with machines and devices; Real-time monitoring and analysis of physical assets that allow companies to understand and act upon insights such as energy and fuel usage, idle time, geo-positioning, faulty parts, security alerts and more; and continuous monitoring of assets that can realize new pricing strategies such as power-by-the-hour and pay-per-use.

All of these new services and technologies will be available in the second quarter of this year.

Hybrid analytics in the cloud

Teradata also lifted the lid off of its new Hybrid Cloud platform, which is built to help customers move analytics workloads across public cloud, managed cloud and on-premises systems in a transparent fashion. One of the main services is orchestration that delivers automatic synchronization, optimized query routing and end-to-end management.

The new Hybrid Cloud is built upon IntelliFlex, a next-generation massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture. It’s described as a “fabric-based structure” that can provide multi-dimensional scalability, meaning that processing power and storage capacity can be added independently to suit business requirements. It offers a “memory-rich configuration for in-memory computing and high-density packaging that is data center friendly”, and can deliver up to three times more memory for comparable performance to current generation Teradata Data Warehouses, the company said.

Hybrid Cloud also consists of Teradata Database on AWS, a new service that’s been made available immediately. Teradata said this is the first of multiple public cloud platforms it’s to make available later this year.

Additionally, Teradata said it’s to expand its managed cloud services into Europe from the second half of this year.

Last but not least, Teradata unveiled a number of new services aimed at helping customers expand into managed and public cloud environments and extend the value of their existing investments in Teradata. These services will cover data and analytics, from architecture consulting to education, onboarding, migration, database conversion, critical systems management and full turnkey service delivery and ongoing management.

“Our Hybrid Cloud innovation represents a defining moment for our customers and the industry,” Teradata’s Ratzesberger continued. “We deliver the Teradata Database with all its rich analytic capabilities across the hybrid cloud, providing customers with application portability and business agility. With the introduction of Teradata IntelliFlex, we are delivering unprecedented value in system availability, configuration, flexibility and hybrid in-memory computing.”

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