Indian enterprises today are sitting on large amounts of data. Today, the need to mine this data is an imperative in order to be successful in the market. Managing this data can be a massive and ongoing effort. Dinesh Jain, Country Manager, Teradata, talks to Ankush Sohoni about some of Teradata's  recent acquisitions and trends in the data space.

Q: Could you talk to us about the current state of data within enterprises?

Indian enterprises today are sitting on a a lot of data. Given the whole social computing momentum that has taken off lately, data sources have increased manifold. In light of this scenario, enterprises either have data that comes from their CRM systems or ERPs (Structured) and they have data that comes from the web, social networking and so on (Unstructured). The need for enterprises today is to put together these two primary sources of data and maintain one repository which can then be mined for information.

Q: Could you talk about some trends in the data space?

If you look at what is happening now, “big data” is on the rise. As I said earlier, today data comes from many sources. Apart from the structured sources you have data that comes from the web, social media and so on. This “Big data” for us is unstructured large data. Now this kind of data is abundant in the market – so the question is how do you really integrate that data with the data that is currently aggregated from various enterprise systems. How do you see where the customer is going, and what channels are going to get through to them. This is the transition that is happening in the market place. Enterprises today are hungry to understand their customers. Interestingly the pyramid is shifting. Lot of customers are now able to choose what they want to see, the internet has given us the option. So this is the challenge that is coming now – the Data Deluge.

Q: Teradata has recently acquired two companies. Could you talk to us about why these acquisitions were important and how the help?

Well, Teradata recently acquired a company called Asterdata which is purely meant for “big data” management. Conventionally what has been happening is that you have your data stored in a typical warehouse, and this gives you the data generated within your organisation in a structured manner. However the data generated outside your organisation (which is relevant to the organisation) is ten times the amount of data you have within the organisation. So what Asterdata does is bring together this unstructured data and makes it consumable for the enterprise. It takes out the data and lets you filter it down to a level that it can become structured and usable and at the same time, it can handle extremely large volumes – in a sense it is ultra scalable. You can then take this data and integrate it with your data warehouse and do cross analysis between your social media data and data which is generated from lets say your ERP system so as to reach your goals.

Asterdata is a technology that works on the concept of map reduce which was actually used to build Google. In fact the engine that is core to Asterdata is open source (coincidentally built by Google) and can be licensed for products. Asterdata was one of these products. Since we see this huge gap between unstructured and structured data, we felt this acquisition was crucial and necessary for the market to take data analytics to the next step. This was the idea behind the Asterdata acquisition.

Another company that we acquired was Aprimo, which is primarily concerned with marketing management. With Asterdata we figured how to bring the unstructured elemnt into data warehousing. However what really is the next step? Since a lot of analytics are primarily concerned with marketing management and successful campaigning, we decided to acquire Aprimo which is a marketing management module. So you have the traditional data warehousing and you have your “big data” taken care of, and you have to perform analytics on these utilise it to successfully run your campaigns. Aprimo sits on top of your data warehouse and can be used to configure campaigns and goals. It is available seperately and does not necessarily need Teradata to operate, like Asterdata. It can be purchased seperately and can sit on top of your CRM. It allows you to see how trends relevant to your organisation are moving.

We felt that given these two products in addition to our Data Warehousing line up, we kind of complete the circle. What starts with bringing together enterprise data sources (Teradata) moves on to integrating your external data sources and big data (Asterdata) and ends with an analytics tool with a campaign definition functionality, you have quite a compelling offering.

Q: Could you talk about Teradata's plans for the Indian market and what kind of customers you're targeting?

India is at a great place currently, especially in our perspective. Data sizes are only going to continue to grow larger. Given this trend, we believe that we have can offer tremendous value to our customers here – current and prospective.

Teradata has always been an analytics compay and this will continue to be our primary offering. We plan to bring more customers onto the Asterdata and Aprimo platforms so that they can benefit from the kind of insights they can get from these tools. We have always been focused on data and we have always been leaders in our space.

We always believe in going to places where we are needed. Keeping this in mind, our customers are primarily in the telecom and BFSI space and is driven by customer analytics. As far as our plans for India are concerned, we are looking at acquiring new customers who can benefit from our offering. We also have a very profitable services business, in addition to which we carry out global research and development efforts out of here.

Our proposition is never core technology but we start with enabling the business. Technology is always a means to the end. However starting with the end and reverse engineering business requirements is key to success.