When Teradata Corp. delivered its fourth quarter earnings report last month, the numbers contained a surprise for Wall Street observers. Annual recurring revenue for public cloud-based services grew to $106 million, a 165% increase year-over-year.

The news has led longtime followers of the 42-year-old database and analytics services provider to take a closer look at the changes Teradata has made over the past year to retool its business model, led by the hiring of a new president and chief executive officer, Steve McMillan, in May.

A key change was to invert the company’s research and development focus, according to McMillan (pictured).

“We spend nearly $300 million on research and development every year, but previously only 30% was in cloud,” McMillan explained. “We flipped that around to have 70% of our investment in cloud and 30% on-premises. Moving that investment envelope has enabled us to put Teradata forward as a very relevant modern cloud platform for our customers.”

McMillan spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. They discussed how the company has reshaped its portfolio of products, the importance of offering a connected, multicloud platform, and ways the firm’s per-query pricing model adds business value. (* Disclosure below.)

Connected and multicloud

Becoming a relevant, modern cloud platform meant defining Teradata’s product portfolio in specific ways that would align with what customers expected from a database services provider.

“As that data gravity is moving towards the cloud, it means that we have to be in front of that and we have to have the technology in place to capture data as it moves to the cloud,” McMillan said. “The vision from a product perspective in terms of cloud-first is to be the leader from a connected multicloud data platform perspective, and each component of that description is really important.”

For Teradata, connected means enabling customers to access data in native object stores for a multitude of different data sources. It also means forming ties with the three largest public cloud providers and positioning Vantage, its cloud data analytics offering, as a key hybrid cloud element.

“We’ve got 17 integrations in the product to native cloud services on Amazon alone,” McMillan noted. “It’s multicloud in terms of being available across all of the cloud platforms, but for existing customers, extending into their on-prem capabilities. We’re starting to think of Teradata Vantage as much more of a platform rather than a product.”

Another key change for Teradata has involved a renewed focus on QueryGrid, a high-speed parallel data fabric designed to make access easier across data and analytical engines.

“We’ve really invested in our QueryGrid technology to be able to federate queries out across multiple cloud environments,” McMillan said. “We don’t charge per megabyte of storage; we charge for successful query execution, and that pricing model relates directly to business value. Our thesis is if we open our Teradata platform to as many data sources as possible, our customers are going to want to query that data, connect it together and get unique valuable insights they can’t get anywhere else.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Teradata Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Teradata nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE