I haven’t heard any new rumors about the layoffs, but given how many people are considering leaving here, there won’t be a need for cuts either. A lot of things have led to this being a company that people are happy to leave. I would like to know what you think are the biggest failures of Teradata's history. Someone has already said Vantage, but I think there have been bigger ones.
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Teradata ELT, stop posting here to try to figure out how you screwed up the company & how to fix it.
This is what happens when you have a cash register sales guy as your CEO, and a CTO with his head in the sand. Then you fire that CEO and replace him with an old retired guy who sold groceries. There were many opportunities to grow through smart acquisitions in the BI and DI adjacent markets.
If you add in eCircle, it was closer to $1BN ….
Don’t forget the $350M goodwill write off that really exceeded investor expectations…expensive icing on the McDonald cake.
The CRM acquisition was the start. Paid 500m and sold for 90m. Do the math…
When the business was growing at 10%, the leadership was complacent. If they had pushed harder and invested correctly, growth would have doubled. The returns would have funded better investments in people, product development and deeper market penetration.
Complacency wasn’t enough though and eventually leadership became distracted and diversified in an attempt to match the competition, weakening the value proposition by conceding that alternatives were acceptable in many cases.
A slippery slope and several unsuccessful, product driven acquisitions later the open source revolution caught the leadership sleeping at the wheel. Almost exactly the same thing that happened with cloud except the forces behind cloud are very different to those behind open source. These commercial enterprises are 100% driven by data and understand its intrinsic value down at the most granular level.
Wall Street gets it, hence their valuations. Somewhat different to the multiples applied to Teradata’s business, which is focused on database technology that could/should have been fundamental to the data economy but is sadly becoming more redundant as each day passes.
Throw in the Think Big debacle and the complete ineptness of the Lund era and you effectively have to start again, which is where the business is today.
No partnership strategy
Limited cloud capabilities
A new, unproven cloud organisation
Limited sales teams and customer relationships
Weak engineering
Zero innovation
Ineffective marketing
Outdated finance full of manual processes and spreadsheets
It’s quite difficult to find any part of the company that actually functions as it should do in a modern business.
Perhaps best summed up by customer feedback, which is usually a (sarcastic) congratulations for delivering capability that is often 3-5 years too late and/or ends up being tested/broken by the customer or increasingly dismissed as irrelevant as another vendor is selected.
Aster and any other “mergers” come to mind.
Still hoping for a layoff but seems like too much attrition at this point...
Leaders with no vision or tolerance for risk. Think about it. For over 40 years there is just one product and one distribution channel. Add lack of innovation with your one core product and you have the mess TDC is in. You diversify your investment portfolio for a reason. TDC is left with one legacy product and they were so late to the cloud startups like Snowflake are ki----g them