We live in a time of hyper disruption. Digital disruptors are turning entire industries upside down at a speed like we have never seen before. There is not a single day where new business models aren’t being introduced. Digital disruption simply changes everything: industries, markets, and every company—large, mid-size or small—must deal with the challenges digitization brings.
I just attended the Digital X conference in Cologne, Germany, and together with more than 20,000 people, I listened to Richard Branson's engaging keynote entitled, “Digitalization is changing German SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises) like hardly any other technical development before.”
A man with a fascinating outlook on business, Sir Richard also has solid advice when it comes to forging partnerships, stating, “Seek out strategic alliances; they are essential to growth and provide resistance to bigger competition.” In fact, at Teradata, we have specifically focused on building out a robust partner ecosystem as a key component of our strategy. Through this focus, we have begun to create new strategic partnerships that open up new channels and expand our offerings into new markets.
Teradata has been at the center of digital transformation for some time now, and I agree with Sir Richard that digitalization is disrupting all companies—large and small. Germany has a strong SME landscape. These companies are often called Germany’s “hidden champions,” because they make up 90% of all companies in the country and more than 50% of the GDP. This is a huge market with tremendous potential for data analytics. I too had the honor of keynoting at Digital X alongside Hagen Rickmann of Telekom Deutschland, and together we announced a strategic partnership to help support German SMEs on their digital transformation journey.
.jpg "1R7A4342_190912_ZUGESCHNITTENFIN_RGB_FIN-(1).jpg")
This partnership will bring Teradata’s leading technology and expertise to a market segment where we normally don’t operate. Teradata has historically been focused on large enterprises due to the massive volume of data they produce and how they use data analytics to get the business answers they need. However, in this era of pervasive digitization, the need to manage data is not determined by the size of the company—every company must become a data company to survive. And we are very pleased to partner with Deutsche Telekom to bring market-leading data analytics to the German SME market.
We also just announced a new strategic partnership with Google to support our customers globally as they migrate to the cloud. As a company, Teradata has embraced a cloud forward mindset extending from our strength in delivering data analytics on-premises. When I launched Teradata Everywhere with our product teams, our vision was to create a new approach that helps customers meet their data and analytic needs into the future by delivering flexibility, agility, scalability, and choice. Now, as our customers evolve to leveraging analytics as a service in the cloud, we are excited that they can benefit from the power and scale that only Teradata can provide.
To support our customers, we have formed strong partnerships with all the leading cloud infrastructure providers. Our customers can leverage the full power of Vantage on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and, now Vantage is becoming available on Google Cloud Platform. Our customers can take advantage of Google Cloud’s scale, speed, reliability, and security capabilities while relying on the data analytics of Vantage. They can really focus on what’s important—finding answers to their toughest business challenges. With this new partnership, Teradata’s as-a-service capabilities will be available across the top three global public cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
I firmly believe in strong partnerships and am excited about these new relationships. Our customer success is the result of a strong collaboration with our partner ecosystem and you can be assured that we will continue to build valuable partnerships to further support our customers.
(Author):
Oliver Ratzesberger
Mr. Ratzesberger has a proven track record in executive management, as well as 20+ years of experience in analytics, large data processing and software engineering.
Oliver’s journey started with Teradata as a customer, driving innovation on its scalable technology base. His vision of how the technology could be applied to solve complex business problems led to him joining the company. At Teradata, he has been the architect of the strategy and roadmap, aimed at transformation. Under Oliver’s leadership, the company has challenged itself to become a cloud enabled, subscription business with a new flagship product. Teradata’s integrated analytical platform is the fastest growing product in its history, achieving record adoption.
During Oliver’s tenure at Teradata he has held the roles of Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, overseeing various business units, including go-to-market, product, services and marketing. Prior to Teradata, Oliver worked for both Fortune 500 and early-stage companies, holding positions of increasing responsibility in technology and software development, including leading the expansion of analytics during the early days of eBay.
A pragmatic visionary, Oliver frequently speaks and writes about leveraging data and analytics to improve business outcomes. His book with co-author Professor Mohanbir Sawhney, “The Sentient Enterprise: The Evolution of Decision Making,” was published in 2017 and was named to the Wall Street Journal Best Seller List. Oliver’s vision of the Sentient Enterprise is recognized by customers, analysts and partners as a leading model for bringing agility and analytic power to enterprises operating in a digital world.
Oliver is a graduate of Harvard Business School’s Advanced Management Program and earned his engineering degree in Electronics and Telecommunications from HTL Steyr in Austria.
He lives in San Diego with his wife and two daughters.
View all posts by Oliver Ratzesberger