Client story Teradata & SADA Collaborate for Self-Service Platform on Google Cloud

Business challenge

For a number of years, customers interested in building and integrating their software with Teradata had to fill out a lot of paperwork. Then they needed to get their IT organization and perhaps several vendors involved before being able to test the functionality and value of the analytics, geospatial, and AI/ML tools. The entire process would take anywhere from three to nine months and often cost thousands of dollars.

“Existing customers sit behind an IT organization that has their SLAs they have to meet, and they have a backlog of work,” says Douglas Ebel, Director, Technical Product Marketing at Teradata. “The last thing they want is a vendor to come in and introduce a bunch of new technologies that would force them to make a later release or enable a workload that will further stretch their infrastructure.”

So Tworkiewicz, Ebel, and the Teradata team set out to make a publicly available, free demo environment that would eliminate customers having to download virtual machines (VMs) through marketplaces or require Teradata to make manual configurations on their end to maintain a dedicated environment.  

Solution

Teradata supports customers on the cloud technologies of their choice. When the time came to select the cloud platform to develop their SQL engine for the demo environment, Teradata selected Google Cloud. Since 2021, Teradata has worked with SADA, a multiple-time Google Cloud Partner of the Year, for their Google Cloud needs and as a partner in SADA’s SaaS Alliance Program. 

Leveraging SADA’s Google Cloud infrastructure expertise 

For three months, SADA’s dedicated team, including a Senior Software Engineer and Senior Infrastructure Engineer, worked with Tworkiewicz, Ebel, and the Teradata team day-to-day. SADA also advised on infrastructure and security for Teradata’s ClearScape Analytics Experience.

On the frontend, SADA helped adjust the user interface (UI) to match new corporate branding and add descriptive content to the registration landing page. The backend work involved the firewall, ports, and moving the development infrastructure inside Teradata. 

Supporting a small technical team with serverless services

Tworkiewicz and Ebel’s ClearScape Analytics project team used Google Cloud solutions, including Cloud Run for deploying and scaling serverless HTTP containers, Cloud Functions as a serverless function-as-a-service that lets Teradata write and deploy code in response to events, and Cloud Build as a serverless CI/CD platform.

Impact

Since launching ClearScape Analytics Experience, Teradata has seen 10 times more usage than previous customer and/or marketplace-based solution offerings. 

“We’ve seen companies we were not familiar with before spin up their dev environments in ClearScape Analytics Experience, and they’re able to build their software–several without any time investment or involvement on our part,” says Tworkiewicz. “We’ve started conducting workshops for dozens of people at a time, something that previously required significant onboarding and effort to set up.”

Gaining new ways of customer engagement

Due to SADA’s technical expertise in helping set up their ClearScape Analytics Experience demo environment on Google Cloud, Teradata has gained new ways to help customers. 

“The first way lets customers experiment with Teradata technology, even if they’re not currently shopping for a data platform,” says Tworkiewicz. “The second way gives current customers the ability to experiment with our technology so they can build solutions and eventually deploy them into production. The third one is where we work with existing customers and do workshops showing them how to create new workloads.”

These new ways of engagement enable Teradata customers to explore 80+ AI/ML use cases across multiple industries and analytic functions, testing tools and compatibility, developing solutions, experimenting with capabilities on their own sample data, and more. The ClearScape Analytics Experience demo is designed to be user-friendly. Customers can spin up a live, self-service environment in minutes, with full access to all ClearScape Analytics functions, complete with 30 GB of storage.

Supplementing traditional go-to-market actions

These new activities supplement the traditional go-to-market and sales department-led actions where they try to nurture existing companies and improve their utilization rate.

“People in our go-to-market organization use the demo a lot with customers,” says Ebel. “They have sessions with 10-50 customers at a time to show the capabilities of what ClearScape Analytics can do for them. The demo environment is very popular.” 

Overall, working with SADA enabled Teradata to:

• Increase customer demos by 10X
• Gain three new ways to engage customers
• Enable customers and partners to run integration tests in CI/CD pipelines involving real Teradata databases
• Develop infrastructure-as-code for deploying the ClearScape Analytics Experience on Google Cloud