Teradata Corp. is embracing both legacy and innovation as the company looks to build on its long history of parallel architecture to become a trusted artificial intelligence platform.
Recently, Teradata has leveraged its partnerships with cloud giants such as Google and Amazon Web Services to offer hybrid data analytics. According to its Chief Executive Officer, Steve McMillan (pictured), the company is prepared for the AI era.
Teradata’s Steve McMillan (right) talks with theCUBE about building an AI-driven data platform.
“Our Teradata approach in the past has been: bring all of your data into our ecosystem,” he said. “But we’ve recognized the fact that data is going to be in many places in the customer ecosystem, and we should move the query engine to the data rather than moving the data to the query engine, which is a very, very different approach. It’s a patented capability that we have in the Teradata ecosystem that allows us to distribute that workload, and we talk about meeting our customers where they want to be met.”
McMillan spoke with theCUBE Research’s Rob Strechay and co-host Savannah Peterson at Teradata Possible during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the future of Teradata and what customers look for in an AI company. (* Disclosure below.)
Harnessing parallel architecture for AI infrastructure
As it has ventured into the AI sphere, Teradata has focused on creating a trusted, ethical and sustainable platform to combat issues of AI hallucination. Large language models can also be an energy sinkhole, a challenge that McMillan claims to have answered.
“If you think about the energy usage predictions for these huge inference engines, you start to get to the point [that] you’ve got to be able to run it efficiently and effectively,” he said. “The real magic of Teradata is [its] massively parallel architecture, and the way that we orchestrate workloads enables us to run complex AI and gen AI workloads just as well on a [central processing unit] infrastructure as they can run on a [graphics processing unit] infrastructure, and that’s a massive leap ahead for us.”
Teradata announced a new partnership with Nvidia Corp. as part of its strategy for AI innovation. The companies will be able to combine Teradata’s software and orchestration abilities with Nvidia’s GPU infrastructure.
“Over the last 40 years, but especially in the last four years, we’ve been able to pivot the company to develop a trusted hybrid platform for AI at scale,” McMillan said. “And we are delivering those solutions right here, right now, today, leveraging the partnerships we’ve just announced with folks like Nvidia. If we can really leverage the AI capabilities and our massively parallel architecture, our core technologies around workload management [and] pre-optimization to really deliver in that AI world, I think it’s going to make a massive difference to the company.”
Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of Teradata Possible:
(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Teradata Possible. Neither Teradata Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)