The big data analytics firm Teradata Corp. is accelerating its move into artificial intelligence application development with today’s launch in private preview of the new Teradata AI Unlimited platform on Amazon Web Services Inc.’s cloud.

The company said the new offering is a serverless AI and machine learning engine that can be used by data scientists, data engineers and developers to explore new applications for AI using data at scale.

Teradata is best known for its big-data software platform VantageCloud Lake, which can be used by enterprises to analyze their business information for useful insights. Its analytics feature set is known as ClearScape Analytics, and the new AI platform is said to be heavily reliant on its capabilities.

According to the company, Teradata AI Unlimited on AWS integrates its powerful ClearScape Analytics tools with a low-cost environment that’s designed to maximize exploration and discovery. It’s a serverless platform that offers compute and in-engine analytics and gives companies more ability to uncover AI use cases, along with native integration within the AWS AI ecosystem.

The platform is designed to act as the foundation of enterprises’ AI initiatives, Teradata said. It provides parallel processing features combined with the ability to build and run AI models at scale, using AWS’ cloud infrastructure.

It also supports a bring-your-own-model approach, wherein users can fine-tune and operationalize any foundational AI model from AWS SageMaker or other platforms. Data can be accessed through open-file formats including Parquet, CSV and JSON using tools such as Jupyter Notebooks, Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Excel.

Additionally, Teradata AI Unlimited will soon support access to any Open Table Format-compatible data lake, such as Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake. That, it said, will enable users to smoothly transition from model prototyping to production environments within VantageCloud.

Teradata Chief Product Officer Hillary Ashton said the company is committed to helping its customers unlock new value through AI. “[It is] another step forward in supporting our customers’ AI initiatives, giving them the ability to cost-effectively and securely explore, experiment and operationalize new AI use cases,” she said.

Doug Henschen of Constellation Research Inc. explained that Teradata AI Unlimited provides a way for data scientists and other SQL-savvy users to access Teradata’s backend and ClearScape analytics capabilities in support of machine learning and data analysis at scale. “ClearScape is expressed in SQL and SQL-like expressions, but you can also use Python in the offering’s notebook interface,” he said. “Teradata’s ambition is to see adoption beyond existing Teradata customers, as an alternative to Spark and other engines, but to me the strongest appeal wold be to folks who already know ClearScape.”

AI Unlimited can be accessed on-demand via the AWS Marketplace now, while the supporting data for the platform can be accessed wherever it resides on the AWS cloud. In this way, the platform eliminates the need for expensive data movement processes and time-consuming infrastructure management.

With AWS’ cloud-based compute instances, computing resources can be spun up or down in a flexible way to enhance costs. Moreover, AI Unlimited’s consumption-based pricing model means customers will only ever have to pay for the time they spend exploring and making discoveries, ensuring AI development costs are kept to a minimum.

The release accelerates Teradata’s mission to become a key player in AI development by leveraging its strengths on the data management side. In an interview on SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio theCUBE in October, Teradata Chief Executive Steven McMillan explained that his company’s goal is to “harmonize data” inside organizations to promote the cross-platform data consistency that’s essential for building accurate and reliable AI applications.

Here’s McMillan’s full interview:

Image: Teradata