Thread regarding Teradata Corp. layoffs

Sell for pennies in the dollar. Hopefully a buyer will come along and save the remaining employees and clear out the failed ELT org and replace with experienced people who may be able to keep the pulse going for a little bit longer

It’s a shame the ELT was enamored by a part time CTO who was way past his sell by date. I believe that was the beginning of the end.

10 years ago Teradata had ~2,000 customers and ~12,000 employees. They were still struggling.

Today they have 1/4 the customers and, with the next layoff round, half the employees.

So, what is the correct staffing level today? History says they won't be profitable with 3,000 employees. Common sense says they can't keep the product going with 6,000.

Time for a reality check.

• Teradata is no longer in Gartner's Leaders' Quadrant for the first time since 1999. There is a reason for this.

• In just one year, Teradata has fallen from solidly in "Leaders" to the trailing edge of "Strong Performers" in Forrester's Wave. On the "Stronger current offering" axis, this puts them behind Databricks, Google, Snowflake, Cloudera, Oracle, and not far ahead of Alibaba and Salesforce. There is a reason for this.

• Several Gartner analysts are telling clients that the DBMS no longer matters, that effectively any leading platform can handle all of your analytic needs.

• The number of Teradata customers is rumored to have dropped by more than 75% in the past 10 years. This leaves them highly dependent on a few large customers, mostly in financial services.

• Multiple landmark customers have left in the past few years. While Teradata ELT keeps saying that Teradata can't be replaced, these customers have demonstrated that it's possible.

• The most recent customer erosion seems to be particularly pronounced in financial services.

• While Teradata touts itself as an analytics engine, the reality is that most of their customer workloads are now ELT processes. These can be rewritten far more effectively in more modern, specialized tooling.

• In order to move to VCL - or to any cloud platform - you must completely rewrite your code. The rewrite must include breaking large processes down into smaller ones. These smaller processes can easily be handled by less expensive competitors.

• Teradata's prices are reported to be 3x to 20x their competitors' prices.

So, would you want to be the final CIO to make a Teradata purchase decision?

Right-sizing is ongoing effort. VCL is set to delist TDC from any exchange. Between now and then, many slides will be shared with gibberish bullet points, but no accountability. OP is on to something.

ELT should pay attention to those ideas