It is interesting to find out how software companies get together for more formal partnerships over the years. Take Teradata and Sunopsis, for example. These two companies recently announced a formal partnership which stems, in part, from joint customers’ experience, and which appears to hold much promise.
Teradata has signed a data warehousing agreement with Sunopsis.
Under the terms of the agreement, data warehousing vendor Teradata will resell integration technology from data integration company Sunopsis, and will closely integrate this with its data warehouse product.
The collaboration forms one of a string of recent deals for NCR Corporation subsidiary Teradata. In October, the company announced that Hallmark Cards is growing the capacity of its enterprise data warehouse, extending the partnership between the two companies. Teradata is also working to expand the China Securities Depository and Clearing Corporation’s data warehouse capacity, and was recently informed that Bank of America is to expand the use of its Teradata data warehouse to address new business initiatives.
One of the main drivers for the Sunopsis partnership has been the experience of customers who have used solutions from both vendors, who then help to persuade the vendors that the solutions are highly complementary and should be more formally related. For example, in the case of Sunopsis/Teradata, customers such as online retailer Overstock.com had been using both products very successfully, with high-volume data integration requirements.
What the Sunopsis solution offers is greater efficiency around the data warehouse side of things. Traditionally, data transformation is usually done on a separate server, with an extract, transform and load (ETL) tool, prior to being loaded into a data warehouse. With the combined Sunopsis-Teradata ELT solution (note the change in acronym, indicating extract, load and then transform), the transformations are done inside the Teradata engine, using all the existing power and scalability of the database.
Performing the transactions within the database eliminates the need for a dedicated transformation server, thereby simplifying a customer’s architecture and implementation, reducing costs and shortening any learning curve. The result in this case is a win-win situation for both vendors. Teradata gains by accessing sophisticated data integration technology that complements its data warehouseing tools, and Sunopsis – until recently a fairly Europe-centric company, and still fairly young – gains access to Teradata’s sales channels.
It sounds a promising partnership.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
