 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. Hi, welcome to theCUBE virtual. You're watching our coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. We are theCUBE virtual and I'm your host Keith Founzen. Today I'm joined with Steve McMillan, CEO, president of Teradata. Steve, welcome to the show. Hey, Keith, great to be here today. Glad to be joining you. So Teradata, this is a big, exciting market, analytics in the public cloud, but let's start with a little history. I remember Teradata as being the thing that I do my SAP data set, my big data on-premises and asking questions of Teradata. How's the public cloud change Teradata's business? I think Teradata's got a fantastic heritage. We've been in the cloud, the data analytics business now for over 40 years. So in fact, you could say that Teradata invented data analytics. The cloud for us is just a really exciting opportunity. It gives our customers another deployment option and we are looking at how we can take our capabilities from on-prem and extend those into the cloud. And that's really what a lot of Teradata's existing customers are looking for. But we also see tremendous opportunity as customers are responding to their market and their environments. They want to use the cloud as a platform, an agile platform, and we're finding that they can see the benefits of using Teradata in terms of performance and scale and giving a level of insight into the data that they've got in the cloud that other platforms can touch. So we're talking about real-time, current issues that's going on in customer environments. Talk to me about kind of the target de jure, the pandemic, how's the pandemic impacting your customer environments, the overall market, the need for this type of analytics capabilities? Look, I think the pandemic has just been an accelerant for a lot of transformation for companies. And you know that the situation with COVID-19 globally has really resulted in a need for companies to be able to respond very agilely to an uncertain environment and an environment that's changing all of the time. You know, AWS is a cloud provider can provide that level of agility. What Teradata does sitting on top of AWS is provide a level of business insight that enables companies to use their data to dynamically respond to the situations that are in front of them today, even as that changes day by day or hour by hour or minute to minute. So I've talked to a lot of customers who have looked at the public cloud as a way to respond, accelerate their businesses in the era of the pandemic. But let's talk about long term vision. How are customers going to use Teradata moving forward in a post pandemic world? Look, I think that just from a data strategy perspective, cloud is one aspect of it. But really what our customers want to get from the data is real insights that help them transform how their businesses work, especially in these changing times. So businesses we find are overwhelmed by the amount of data that they've got. There's never a day in the world where there's less data than there was the day before. And coping with that explosion of data, getting real insights so that you can work out what you're going to do, that is what we believe forms the basis of a long-term data strategy. So help me paint the picture for customers as they look at their multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments in which I have my systems of record on premises still, I have my next generation customer facing applications in the public cloud, I have all this transactional customer experience data. How does Teradata help bridge those worries? That's where I think Teradata is uniquely placed. You know, we bring that 40 years of heritage and investment and data analytics and we help our customers take that into the cloud. We see most of our customers now have a cloud strategy. I was reading an industry report the other day that said that, you know, on average, organizations will have seven clouds that they have to deal with. Many customers are deploying on AWS because they see it as a great cloud platform where they can extend their on-prem data capabilities into the cloud, use the facilities and features of AWS combined with Teradata to really transform the data fabric and the analytics capabilities of their organization. So it's really that combination that provides some unique opportunities for our customers. And again, using Teradata and the AWS cloud provides unprecedented scale, a scale that we've been able to develop in our technology over the last few decades. And we take that know-how and deploy it in the Amazon cloud so that customers have a great degree of control. They can optimize how their queries run inside the environment. They can get degrees of cost certainty that they don't otherwise have. They can govern their data in ways that give some complete control and security over the analytics, the insights that they make available so that they can really change how their companies operate. So obviously you run a sizable business, a mature business that's finding this incredible growth mechanism. But at the end of the day, when your employees come to you with a new idea, you want to know, what's the return on investment? You know, money isn't free, resources aren't free, you have limited staff, just like everyone else. Talk to me about the return on investment from Teradata. So I think Teradata really offers the ability to get that cost per query and the sweet spot for our customers. So we've done a number of things. We've made a cost calculator available on our website so that our customers can look at and compare how much it costs to run inside a Teradata environment on an AWS cloud and how that compares to all of the other options that may be available to them. And what we see is often an order of magnitude difference in terms of the cost profile for running Teradata and getting true business level insights from the data that they have compared to some of the competitive solutions out there. And that might really surprise some of your viewers, Keith, in terms of that's not usually what you'd associate Teradata with, what you associate Teradata with as an absolutely robust system that's completely machine-critical. But they really get those features in a really controlled environment where the cost per query is optimized. We've got consumption-based pricing models that enables that return and investment curve that you were talking about to be really early on in the process of using our technologies. So I've been part of these big, massive projects within enterprises where we look at these whether it's data lakes, unstructured data, et cetera. We want to ask big questions of them. The big problem with that has always been cost overruns. These projects are always, always, in my experience, go over budget. How does the combination of AWS, which has the potential to have unlimited budget and Teradata, which solves basically an unlimited budget issue or addresses an unlimited budget problem, how do you help control that risk and avoid cost overruns? Yeah, so working in an environment like AWS, which is completely elastic, really does give tremendous value to our conveying customer set. But as you said, that elasticity comes at a cost. So in order to make sure that our customers run the most important queries that they get the most value from, we utilize technologies that we've taken from our on-prem deployments, things like query optimization and workload management. And that lets us give our customers a degree of control in that environment that they wouldn't otherwise have. So we're really excited about the future of Teradata and the AWS Cloud. Now, we've spent a lot of time talking about the AWS Cloud, but a lot of customers simply aren't there. A lot of them are just meagre, too dependent as a need for today. Do I have to be all-in in AWS and public cloud in general to take advantage of all of these advantages, of all of these capabilities? What we want to do from a Teradata Advantage perspective is really promote it as a platform, and a platform that can be used across all of the cloud environments and into the on-prem environment if you have Teradata Advantage deployed in your on-prem, et cetera. So we're all about opening up choice and flexibility. Now, the Teradata technology really enables our customers not just to have a data-marked view of things where you're pulling out simple queries on the rear view mirror of what happened, but our analytics technology lets you get into questions like, well, why did that event happen? What's going to happen next? And what should we do to proactively plan that? We see use cases like the internet of things where there's preventative and predictive maintenance on lots of devices out there, and you can imagine the amount and volume of data that's getting consumed, and we analyze that data real-time, get real insights to make recommendations to really enable an organization that's servicing these machines the right level of insight to optimize how they're working on a day-to-day business is really exciting. So again, we're now shipping the conversation back over to public cloud in consumption. How do I consume Teradata Advantage in AWS? We've got a number of different deployment models in terms of consuming Teradata Advantage. So you can have a pay-as-you-go model, which means you can start at nothing and work up over time. Our consumption model is really unique because we actually, we bell on the basis of what we call logical IO, which means that it's only when queries work inside the environment that a customer gets billed for it. So you don't just get charged by walking into the room and having the light switch on, you only get charged when that light is doing something meaningful for you and your organization and actually result in end-states for you as a company. We also got blended pricing models so you can work out what the optimum deployment model is for Teradata Advantage inside the cloud. So loss of choice, we're all about giving that flexibility and choice in terms of how we operate. So you hit on the topic of IoT, but let's hit that dead on and talk about another hot part of not just the IT conversation, but the cloud conversation and especially data analytics, the edge. How does a solution like Vantage play with data sets that live at the edge and have to be carried at the edge? One of the great things of a Teradata Advantage and how we're looking at it just now, if we think about what you may recall as Teradata, the desire was to try and get everything into Teradata and have all the data captured and say that ecosystem, that doesn't work as well in the cloud world. What we're all about is opening up that platform. So some of your viewers may be surprised, we now integrate with 18 of the AWS services to really start opening the platform up. We give access to from Teradata into native object stores and cloud environments so that customers don't have to duplicate data, they don't have to copy it into Teradata and have that data locked in there. We can access a whole plethora of data capture mechanisms that the cloud providers, AWS make available in terms of those APIs and those calls so that we can integrate it all together and get the best possible set of data sources for Teradata Advantage to work on. So really exciting time in terms of opening up that platform, being really modern in terms of looking at the data fabric that our customers have and how they're using these cloud services on a day-to-day basis and integrating that with a power advantage. Steve McMillan, president and CEO of Teradata. We really appreciate it. 40 years of analytics history, we're seeing the movement in public cloud where we're going from these companies that we put all our data into, centralize adapting to the reality of edge data center, public cloud, meeting us where the data is at. We're super excited to now promote you into an alum of the queue. Make sure to join us for additional coverage of AWS re-invent 2020 on the queue.