We are always looking for simpler, easier ways to stay ahead of change. For example, we all need to update software, and recently I needed to move some software from an old PC to my new one. Was it that simple? Not so much. The problem was a licensing constraint: the license was only good for one system — not one at a time, but a specific system itself! In order to run on my new system I would need to purchase a new license.
I guess I should not have been too surprised; for decades, computer software has been sold with an outdated mindset. But all that is slowly changing.
I am happy to tell you that Teradata is jumping ahead of change with an innovative, simplified new licensing approach. For years, database software was, admittedly, hard to purchase. It was dependent on the platform, what features you wanted, and it required up-front costs with ongoing maintenance. This model once sufficed but … that was then – this is now.
As the world of cloud offerings expanded, Teradata responded in 2016 with a new innovation: “Teradata Everywhere,” making the same Teradata database available across the spectrum of deployment options: from physical on-premises hardware and private VMware clouds, to our own managed cloud offering and both Amazon and Azure public clouds. This was a great step for Teradata but it exposed an issue with our licensing – lack of consistency and portability.
At the same time, Teradata was also dealing with data warehouse appliance challenges. In order to meet the needs of entry level users, enterprise class warehouses and everything in-between, Teradata began to license each feature separately. The thought being: if you aren’t going to use it, why should you buy it? Unfortunately that made features availability inconsistent, which caused problems when a corporation had multiple platforms of different types in their ecosystem.
To address these challenges, Teradata has significantly revamped the way its data and analytics software will be licensed to make it simpler, uniquely portable, and entirely consistent. The end result will make it much easier to do business with Teradata and expand the ability of customers to leverage Teradata not only on premises but also in various cloud offerings.
Teradata’s new licensing modelis simple and straight forward. Previously separate features are now bundled together. This means all licenses come with Columnar, Temporal, Row Level Security and Secure Zones. These are powerful features that allow for high performance, greater time-based analytics, and robust data governance.
The new model also allows for different business capacity. Starting with a free developer tier, there are also three workload based tiers: base, advanced, and enterprise.
