As Teradata Moves into Cloud, R&D Lab Steps into Light in San Diego

Teradata Labs President Oliver Ratzesberger (BVBigelow photo)

When Oliver Ratzesberger joined Teradata (NYSE: [[ticker:TDC]]) in 2013, the global computing giant just outside of Dayton, OH, was known for its high-end technology in data warehousing and big data analytics.

At that time, Teradata sold its high-performance systems, which consolidate data from different sources, for millions of dollars to many of the biggest companies in financial services, healthcare, insurance, retail, and manufacturing.

But Teradata’s continued focus on its legacy business, with its on-premises systems and license-based software, was wearing thin, and the company’s target market has been evaporating. By some accounts, over half of the companies on the Fortune 500 list of biggest U.S. companies in 2000 have gone bankrupt, been acquired, dropped off the list, or ceased to exist.

For Teradata, the bottom fell out roughly a year ago, when the company’s first-quarter financial results badly missed Wall Street expectations. Teradata shares have plunged by roughly 38 percent since then.

Now Teradata is undergoing a transformation that has Ratzesberger playing a key role as the president of Teradata Labs, the company’s engineering R&D center in suburban San Diego.

In a recent interview at his office in Rancho Bernardo, where Teradata has about 1,000 employees, the Austrian-born Ratzesberger said he has been overseeing a broad effort to integrate platforms, unify data, develop more innovative analytics, and to adapt and support open-source initiatives like Presto and Hadoop.

“We are heading full-steam into the cloud,” Ratzesberger said, explaining that longstanding technical limitations in what he called “the interconnect” that physically links online networks had previously precluded Teradata from moving its massively parallel processing (MPP) technology into the cloud.

“The moment you slice [data] into 1,000 pieces, the whole network is only as fast as the slowest piece,” Ratzesberger explained. But recent innovations in the most commonly used supercomputer interconnect (InfiniBand and Ethernet) have radically improved bandwidth and reduced latency—and enabled Teradata to load its technology on Amazon Web Services earlier this year for the first time.

“This has been in the making for years, but there are

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.