Teradata reports Q3 revenue of $606 million, down 3% in “constant” dollars, down 9% in actual dollars, the kind you can spend. Product revenue, from selling software and boxes, declined 14%. In a brutal call with analysts, CEO Mike Koehler noted: “revenue was not what we expected.” It could have been a recorded message. Teradata executives tried to blame the
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Dell and Silver Lake Partners announce plans to buy EMC for $67 billion, a transaction that is a big deal in the tech world, and mildly interesting for analytics. Dell acquired StatSoft in 2014,but nothing before or since suggests that Dell knows how to position and sell analytics. StatSoft is lost inside Dell, and will be even more lost inside Dell/EMC.
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Strata+Hadoop World week is a good opportunity to update the list of platforms for high-performance advanced analytics. Vendors are hustling this week to announce their latest enhancements; I’ll post updates as needed. First some definition. The scope of this analysis includes software with the following properties: Support for supervised and unsupervised machine learning Support for distributed processing Open platform or multi-vendor
Read moreHere is a quick review of the capabilities for advanced analytics in Hadoop for five vendors at the recent Strata NYC conference: 0xData Alpine Data Labs Oracle SAS Skytree 0XData Product(s) H20 (open source project) h2o (R package) Description Smart people from Stanford with VC backing and a social media program. Services business model with open source software. H20 is an
Read moreSAS’ recent announcement of an alliance with Hortonworks marks a good opportunity to summarize SAS’ Hadoop capabilities. Analytic enterprises are increasingly serious about using Hadoop as an analytics platform; organizations with significant “sunk” investment in SAS are naturally interested in understanding SAS’ ability to work with Hadoop. Prior to January, 2012, a search for the words “Hadoop” or “MapReduce”
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SAS charged its sales force with selling 2,000 licenses for Visual Analytics in 2013; the jury is still out on whether they met this target. There’s lots of marketing action lately from SAS about this product, so here’s an FAQ. Update: SAS recently announced 1,400 sites licensed for Visual Analytics. In SAS lingo, a site corresponds roughly to one machine,
Read moreDoes SAS run “inside” Greenplum? Can existing SAS programs run faster in Greenplum without modification? Clients say that their EMC rep makes such claims. The first claim rests on confusion about EMC Greenplum’s product line. It’s important to distinguish between Greenplum Database and Greenplum DCA. Greenplum DCA is a rack of commodity blade servers which can be configured with Greenplum
Read moreWhen SAS released its new in-memory analytic software last December, I predicted that SAS would have one reference customer in 2012. I believed at the time that several factors, including pricing, inability to run most existing SAS programs and SAS’ track record with new products would prevent widespread adoption, but that SAS would do whatever it takes to get at
Read moreCatching up on the news here. The keyword in the title of this post is “announces”. It’s not news that EMC partners with Alpine Data Labs. Alpine Miner is a nifty product, but in the predictive analytics market Alpine is an ankle-biter compared to SAS, SPSS, Mathsoft and other vendors. Greenplum and Alpine were sister companies funded by
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