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IBM Takes Over Teradata

Updated: Sep 16, 2022



The Teradata announcement of outsourcing maintenance agreements to IBM shocked the Teradata community. Is this step a sign of an IBM takeover?

Teradata support employees are holding their breath to the point of turning blue. However, when critical Teradata outages occur, customers have no choice but to hold their breath and turn to Big Blue.

Teradata and IBM have been fierce competitors for decades, so I think this decision Is a Big Mistake (IBM). Do you remember the IBM acquisition of Netezza? How did that work out? IBM drove a great product into the ground.

So why do you outsource maintenance to your number one competitor? Turning over the keys to the castle makes absolutely no sense. Teradata might be saving a few dollars, but customers stand to lose millions. And Teradata's decision to lay off valuable Teradata global support experts is not only risky, and in my opinion, reckless and unethical.

When a large Teradata customer's data warehouse goes down, it costs some customers a million dollars an hour. If the machine is down for a day, it costs 24 million dollars. So time is of the essence, but don't worry, Teradata customer, the company we have been clawing, scratching, and fighting with for four decades, will be there soon to fix it. And we have provided each IBM professional with a few weeks of training classes.

I can only describe the panic in the Teradata community as a migration tsunami.

How do I know about Teradata migrations? I am considered by many to be the top expert on Teradata, so customers trust me to help them migrate.

People in the Teradata community refer to me as Tera-Tom because I have written books on every aspect of Teradata. In addition, I've taught about a thousand classes to large Teradata customers in North America, Africa, India, China, and Europe. I've also trained Teradata Global Support to diagnose and fix Teradata machines. Trust me when I tell you: Teradata machines are the most complex and expensive systems globally and are not easy to repair.

Teradata may not want your business, but I sure do. So let me make the migration from Teradata a straightforward and simple process.

I provide a Nexus service, the only tool to query all systems simultaneously. But even more impressive is that the Nexus converts and migrates Teradata tables to any other database platform on the market. Even sweeter, customers can use Nexus to join data from Teradata with the systems they are migrating to with the Nexus Federated Query builder. Nexus joins data across platforms similar to Teradata's QueryGrid. The only difference is that Nexus is faster and merges data from any combination of systems.

I have customers migrating thousands of tables from Teradata to various cloud platforms.

Ten years ago, it became apparent that customers would one day need to access data from dozens of database platforms, maybe even hundreds or thousands of different platforms. In addition, too much data is coming from other parts of the world that need joining. So, my development team built Nexus to convert, migrate, and join data across all systems, with no technical expertise from the customer required.

Most of my Teradata customers migrate to multiple data warehouse platforms across the AWS, Azure, and Google clouds. For example, I now have Teradata customers using Nexus to migrate to a combination of Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Aurora, Google BigQuery, Azure Synapse, MySQL, Postgres, and Yellowbrick.

I spoke on the condition of anonymity with a long-time Teradata executive, but his first words were, "I left Teradata to work for Oracle." I asked why and he said, "Teradata doesn't know how they perform against other cloud databases."

Maybe the underlying issues of their proprietary hardware are why Teradata is selling off their maintenance to IBM, but ironically, I have many IBM customers migrating to Yellowbrick.

A big reason for migrating traditional legacy systems is cost savings and performance gains with modern architectures for on-premises solutions. In addition, many companies are migrating to the cloud to reduce the overhead of managing the data on-premises. However, the competition between AWS, Azure, and Google has customers investing in all three clouds, giving rise to a new distributed cloud model.


The Gartner Top Strategic Technical Trends for 2021 report suggests that the distributed cloud model will emerge to address the explosion of data growth, particularly at the network edge. In addition, companies that adopted a hybrid-cloud strategy see the next evolution in the cloud as a distributed cloud model.

Customers want their data across all public clouds but have one service manage the data across clouds. The potential for saving money is guaranteed because all options favor the customers controlling their destiny, hedging their bets to find the best deals.

Distributed cloud is the first cloud model incorporating the physical location of cloud platforms and the delivery of services in its definition. The customer initially went to the cloud because the physical location was not considered. However, a distributed cloud is aware of physical location across on-prem, public, hybrid, and edge computing.

The three keys to different physical data locations are federation, federation, and federation.

A distributed cloud model delivers cloud software and hardware stacks outside the public cloud provider's data center, providing a mesh of interconnected cloud resources forming a best-of-breed logical cloud.

The two greatest assets a company can provide their prospects are moving data between systems automatically and the capability to federate queries across platforms with no technical knowledge required.

I am thrilled that my instincts were correct and that spending 15 years developing Nexus to query, migrate, and join data across all systems was a visionary idea. As a result, customers can now migrate instantly to and from any database and join data across all systems as fast and efficiently as if the data is one logical distributed cloud system.

Intelligent Nexus Pro Desktops coordinate with Nexus Servers to provide the perfect distributed cloud model.

  • Nexus Pro Desktops allow users to query, move, or join data across all systems as one logical system.

  • Nexus Servers convert and control the movement between all database platforms over high-speed networks.

  • Users can work from anywhere because they can execute jobs on any Nexus Server.

  • Migrations between any two systems become a simple point-and-click process.

  • The Nexus Super Join Builder Virtualizes the joining of tables and views across all systems.



I am happy to provide a free assessment of your current Teradata environment and prepare a Proof of Concept and a migration plan to help automate your migration process.


Thank you,


Tom Coffing

CEO, Coffing Data Warehousing

Direct: 513 300-0341

Website: CoffingDW.com





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