Oracle, Teradata, and Revenge of the Legacy Database Vendors

These old dogs have learned some new tricks

John Foley Feb 22

Long-established database providers—IBM, Oracle, SAP, Teradata, et al.—are often referred to as “legacy” vendors, a term used derisively to imply they are expensive, entrenched, siloed, and outdated.

But these old database dogs are learning new tricks. It would be a mistake to think their best days are behind them.

My view is that the so-called traditional database providers will be hard to displace because they have long-established customer relationships, they are proficient in hybrid cloud environments (because so many of their customers are still on premises), and they continue to innovate as they race to keep up with cloud-native startups.

Not only that, but the potential pain, costs, and risks of migrating away from these installed database management systems are a strong incentive to IT teams to stay put. In many cases, those DBMSes represent years of investment, and changes are not to be taken lightly.

Recent developments by Oracle and Teradata—which together have been around for more than 80 years—provide a few proof points that these elder citizens of the tech industry are not taking anything for granted.

Oracle’s Next Growth Engine

In the past few months, Oracle has agreed to acquire Cerner for $28.3 billion, giving it a major foothold in the healthcare market; it has one-upped MongoDB in the area of cross-platform compatibility; and it has been certified by the Defense Department for top-secret use cases. The details:

• The deal to acquire Cerner is a bold bet and potential strategic advantage as Oracle gets more deeply into vertical industries. It brings together Cerner’s expertise in electronic health records and Oracle’s data management and cloud infrastructure capabilities. Larry Ellison expects Cerner to be “a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come.”

• Oracle has developed and implemented a new API for MongoDB workloads. The Oracle Database API for MongoDB makes is possible to run MongoDB apps, using MongoDB tools and drivers, on Oracle’s Autonomous Database cloud service. The API bridges Oracle’s relational model and MongoDB’s document model so customers don’t have to make an “either/or” decision. (For the full story, see my blog post, “MongoDB in the Oracle Cloud? New Silo-Busting API Makes It Possible.”)

• The DoD has authorized Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for use in hosting sensitive and top secret workloads. Oracle has a long history of working with defense, intelligence, and other US federal agencies. In fact, the CIA was Oracle’s first customer.

Teradata Teams with AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft

Like Oracle, Teradata traces its roots to the 1970s. It was once part of the former National Cash Register Co., founded in 1884. Talk about legacy!

Teradata sometimes gets dinged for its large installed base of on-prem systems, but the company has been transitioning to the cloud through partnerships with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. In its Q4 earnings, Teradata reported a 91% increase in public cloud annual recurring revenue for 2021, a signal of growing cloud adoption.

Look at what Teradata has done in February alone:

• Announced an expanded global partnership with Microsoft to integrate Teradata’s Vantage data warehouse with Microsoft Azure’s Power BI and Synapse Analytics services. American Airlines is among the customers using Vantage on Azure.

• Disclosed more than 100 customer wins for the second half of 2021, including Barclays, Disney Studios, FedEx, Groupon, Nike, and T-Mobile.

• Shared the results of a benchmark test that demonstrated its ability to scale to 1,000+ active users on a system running 1,000+ processor nodes in the cloud. The test environment ran for several weeks on AWS, which described it as “one of the largest single system tests ever run on AWS.”

For more on Teradata’s priorities and a partnership with AWS, see my podcast interview with SVP Ashish Yajnik.

Maybe Legacy Isn’t Such a Bad Word

Oracle and Teradata are among the Cloud Database Report’s Top 20 vendors. You can download the full list below.

	Cloud Database Top 20 95.1KB ∙ PDF File
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Make no mistake, Oracle, Teradata, and the other Boomer-generation database vendors face challenges, including the risk of obsolescence in a fast-paced market and customer worries about lock-in and licensing.

But, as these recent examples show, they are growing and expanding—into new industries (in the case of Oracle) and through far-reaching cloud partnerships (in the case of Teradata).  

So, while “legacy” can connote unwanted baggage, it may also signal decades of hard-earned experience supporting the most demanding operational and analytical workloads in the world. The old dogs still have some bite.