Tera-Tom here!  Steve Jobs was once challenged with how he was going to deal with a competitor called Sony.  He remarked, “No problem.  Sony is a hardware company.  Apple is a software company.  It’s all about the software!”

Who in the world could have imagined that IBM, Oracle, and Teradata’s stock could head south so drastically?  It is not their fault.  Each of these vendors is fantastic and each has never provided better systems, but it’s all about the software!

All hardware/database vendors are struggling because there are so many new and exciting technologies.  You see, all computer systems have an Achilles heel.  Each of them must move the blocks of data from disk into memory, and that is what takes the most time.  Once the data block is in memory, then everyone is just as fast as everyone else.  Each vendor basically uses the exact same chip maker, disk maker, and memory maker.  None have an advantage over the other.

To give themselves an advantage, Teradata always specialized in parallel processing, but now all vendors do the same.  Some vendors specialize in columnar databases while others use In-memory solutions.  Others provide MapReduce, and each one is now working directly with Hadoop.  Depending on the applications or specific query, each vendor is faster in certain situations.  The race is on and nobody can predict who will be the eventual winner.  I already know the winner.  It’s the customer!  That is because the industry now gives the advantage to the nimble enterprise that utilizes the best technology for the best application.

Every large purchase right now will be expensive and it could be a mistake.  The greatest decision your CIO could make right now is to not invest in buying a larger database, but instead invest in the desktop of every user.  The only clear and guaranteed path to success is to buy desktop software that unites the entire enterprise.  Buy software that works on every system; software that displays tables and views visually, and then has a built in GPS system to guide users to what joins to what.  Buy software that allows users to point and click and watch the SQL built for them automatically.  Buy software that provides advanced graphing and charting on all answer sets.  Buy software that is so powerful and intelligent that it can convert the tables and the data from any system to any other system.  An Enterprise purchase of Nexus today will pay off for the next decade because it’s all about the software.

The enterprise strategy of old was to invest heavily in a single database vendor and then pay for an upgrade every year.  The enterprise strategy of old spent tens of millions of dollars on the database and then gave every user freeware to query it.  Why not enhance every user tenfold by giving them the tools they need to better understand the data and the business?

For 15 years, Coffing Data Warehousing has been waiting for this moment in time.  We have worked with every single vendor on every flavor of Hadoop, MapReduce, Columnar, In-memory, parallel processing, OLTP systems and even the mainframe. We always knew that hardware vendors would one day become so equally competitive that they would drive the industry towards a commodity.  And we always knew, “It’s all about the software!”

Of course, the big excuse is that the vendor provides a free query tool.  Seeing that you’re spending millions a year for upgrades, that is so nice of them.  Free is hard to beat, but with Nexus, you pay some dollars up front your first year, but after the first year, it’s pennies on the dollar for the next decade so it’s practically free.  Call or write me if you want to see a demo of the best software the world has to offer.

 

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