But whatever you think about Teradata’s approach to handling big data workloads, make no mistake about the company’s clout: It has been around for decades, and it’s still analyzing boatloads of data for some of the biggest names in business. I spent a day in February touring the Teradata Labs facility in San Diego, and although I heard all about the technology and the company’s vision for a Teradata-Hadoop-Aster analytics super-environment, the thing that stuck out most were the users. Walmart, eBay, Continental … Apple.

Here’s how they’re all using Teradata and at what scale (try not to faint when you think of the bill):

• Apple: Apple is operating a multiple-petabyte Teradata system (that became apparent during its iCloud launch in 2011) and, I learned, was Teradata’s “fastest ever customer to a petabyte.” Apple uses the data warehouse to get a better understanding of its customers across product groups. Now every piece of identifiable information — and those iTunes interactiona generate a lot of data — goes into the system so the company knows who’s who and what they’re up to.

Rows of Teradata appliances.

• Walmart: The retail giant deployed Teradata’s first-ever terabyte-scale database in 1992, and it has grown, uh, a bit since then. Its operational system was at 2.5 petabytes as of 2008, and is certainly leaps and bounds bigger by now — likely well into the double digits when you consider it operates separate ones for Walmart and Sam’s Club as well as a backup system. The analytics efforts have essentially helped Walmart become a massive consignment shop. It tells suppliers, “You have three feet of shelf space. Optimize it.” And then it gives them any data they could possibly need to determine what’s selling, how fast and even whether they should redesign their packaging to fit more on the shelves.
• eBay: eBay (e ebay) has two systems in place, and they’re both big. Its primary data warehouse is 9.2 petabyes; its “singularity system” that stores web clicks and other “big” data is more than 40 petabytes. It has a single table that’s 1 trillion rows. Yes, this is smaller than the 50 petabytes worth of Hadoop capacity eBay added last year, but Teradata is quick to point out that all of its systems support data into and out of Hadoop, so it’s not as if eBay is operating two entirely distinct data environments.

Of course, Teradata has lots of other petabyte-scale customers, with Verizon, AT&T and Bank of America among them. Here are a few more interesting use cases:

• Harrah’s (now part of the Caesar’s Entertainment casino empire) understands how much money particular gamblers can afford to lose in a day before they won’t come back the next day.
• Disney is rolling out new bracelet tickets equipped with GPS and NFC that track everything visitors do while inside Disney’s amusement parks. The New York Times detailed the privacy implications of this move in a January article.
• A manufacturing customer generates 20 terabytes of data per hour while testing products, although that volume is ultimately reduced to about 1 terabyte after the valuable data is filtered out.
• At some point, Continental Airlines decided it wanted to keep its customers happy and began assessing them by lifetime value (which, it turns out, is often inversely related to frequent-flyer status) and began making alternative arrangements for them as soon as the airline realized flights would be delayed.
• A luxury car company used Aster Data to analyze the pattern of failures for various components inside its cars. It found out that lighting, seats and infotainment often failed together (they’re on the same circuit) and began inspecting all three when a customer comes in for service on any of them.

None of this means Teradata is destined to continue being a huge name in analytics (Scott Yara, co-founder of rival EMC Greenplum, recently called data warehouses this generation’s mainframe), but it’s still interesting to learn how big companies are analyzing their data, regardless what they’re running on. And with exabytes worth of data no doubt residing in customer systems across the world, Teradata isn’t going anywhere soon.

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Hadapt, Cambridge, Mass., is in a good position if it can deliver on its promise of letting organizations process and query all their data in the same environment. As I explained recently, some large companies actually demand such a capability at some point. One eBay executive recently noted that he’s looking for a single system that would let him do away with his current three-tier Teradata-and-Hadoop data environment.

Other vendors, including EMC, Oracle, IBM and Teradata are trying to enable the same thing, but they generally do so through connectors that let data flow between the separate systems. “We think we’re the only ones that have built that architecture from the ground up,” Hadapt Founder and CEO Justin Borgman told me.

Hadapt is bringing in some experienced big data personnel to help it capitalize on its unique value proposition. They include new board member Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan, formerly of HP and Aster Data (now part of Teradata), and advisor David Kellogg, former CEO of NoSQL success story MarkLogic. Philip Wickline, former VP of engineering at Endeca (which Oracle bought earlier this week), joined Hadapt as CTO in July.

Borgman seems particularly excited about the addition of Shahani-Mulligan. He said that Aster Data and Vertica (now part of HP) were the two companies he most wants to emulate, and he gives Shahani-Mulligan credit for Aster Data’s successful positioning of its SQL-MapReduce engine.

Hadapt’s product, the Hadapt Adaptive Analytical Platform, is in private beta, and Borgman said he expects a public beta later this year. The new funding will help that process along by giving Hadapt more resources to pour into product development.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user Rodrigo_Amorim.

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From left nPario's Bassel Ojjeh, Cloudscale's Bill McColl and bit.ly's Hilary Mason at Structure Big Data

What if you amassed petabytes of data, then realized you had nothing you wanted to do with it? It’s not enough to hoard data, or run basic analytics hoping for patterns. To create the true promise of a big data revolution, nPario President and CEO Bassel Ojjeh says the industry needs big apps. His startup has just raised $5 million in a first round of funding from WPP Digital (s WPPGY ) to help make those apps possible.

For example, nPario already counts WPP (as well as Electronic Arts and Yahoo) as a customer of its software. The company’s product for marketers takes in an assortment of information such as demographics, web surfing history and even IP addresses to serve up advertisements based on that data. It’s like targeted advertising on speed — speed tweaked to give you the best high based on a quick read of your DNA.

Bassel Ojjeh CEO of nPario

That’s the pitch anyway, and to build its software — which can be purchased as a hosted product or sold and run inside a company’s data center — nPario licensed some of the technology associated with columnar databases created at Yahoo. Building scalable columnar databases is a challenge (Aster Data  and Vertica  both did it and both were purchased this year). Now nPario has exclusive access to Yahoo’s technology (Ojjeh worked at Yahoo trying to analyze and wrangle some of the big data available to him at the portal). Ojjeh said nPario, which was formed in January 2010, also allows programmers to work with the data in a SQL format if they like.

As for taking investment from WPP, Ojjeh point out that the company — which pulls in more than $15 billion in revenue in the marketing and advertising sector — has its hands full trying to analyze the effectiveness of ads served up via digital media, and it wants to grow that aspect of its business so the digital side becomes 50 percent of the firm’s revenue. Tools like those nPario offers will help, and with WPP has a strategic investor, nPario doesn’t have to play one publisher against another.

Beyond his business, Ojjeh is also preaching that big data needs big apps to show companies why and how they can take the information they’re storing and filter through it. “People are enamored by big data, but the next thing that happens is companies spend money storing it and looking for the big apps,” said Ojjeh. “If you can’t build scalable apps, then it doesn’t really matter. Your back is against the wall and the big apps have to follow the big data very quickly: otherwise it becomes a mirage of value.”

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Just last month, HP said it would buy Vertica, snapping up another analytics provider. This leaves Dell out in the cold as a large computer seller without a data warehousing and analytics play. Through a partnership with Aster, it met that need for its customers, but my colleague Derrick was pushing hard for Dell to snap up Aster and own its own data warehousing and analytics play. By the way, you can see Greenplum, Netezza and Teradata executives speak this month in New York City at our Structure Big Data conference on March 23.

Teradata, which already holds an 11 percent stake in Aster, said this morning it would buy the remaining 79 89 percent of the company for $263 million. It would gain $21 million in cash, bringing the value of this chunk of the deal to $242 million. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2011, and Teradata plans to support Aster Data’s customers and integrate its employees immediately upon completion of the acquisition.

The Aster acquisition follows on the heels of Teradata’s $525 million bid to buy Aprimo, another data analytics software company, and also eliminates a partial competitor for Teradata. Aster’s software was used by some companies to create their own data warehousing systems built on commodity hardware — systems that were much cheaper than those offered by Teradata. However, Aster had also grown its product line to encompass analytics, which is what Teradata seems to be most interested in.

So for Dell, and any other big data wannabes out there, the only proven options left to start fulfilling this niche are ParAccel, Infobright and Ingres’s VectorWise platform.

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Here are some of the recent deals and some exclusive details on forthcoming rounds and valuations of some of the better-known cloud and big data focused companies:

• StorSimple, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based storage company making hybrid storage systems, recently raised $13 million in Series B funding. The company, which has yet to bring in a dollar in sales, is being valued at $50 million.
• RightScale recently raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tenya Capital, DAG Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and Presidio Ventures at a reported valuation of $100-$125 million. Another source suggests that RightScale’s valuation is even higher.
• Eucalyptus, a company headed by ex-MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, is said to be valued in excess of $100 million, and raised $20 million in new funding from New Enterprise Associates, Benchmark Capital and BV Capital.

On the big data front:

• Aster Data recently snagged $30 million in new funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital and a new undisclosed investor. Rumored valuation: somewhere between $85 and $120 million. Update: A company spokesperson took issue with the valuation and emailed me the following statement, which only re-enforces my thesis: “The valuation you/GigaOm stated recently is more reflective of the previous B round that closed Q4 2008, and while we don’t disclose the actual valuation of the latest C round it is in fact materially greater than the Series B.”
• I’ve heard rumors that Cloudera, the Hadoop-based big data company and one of the all-stars of big data movement, is looking to raise a fresh round of funding and is being valued in excess of $100 million.

My sources tell me a handful of cloud companies are likely to raise a ton of money in the coming weeks. So now you must be wondering what’s going on. There are two forces at work:

From a macro standpoint, the investment industry’s thinking about cloud-based investments has evolved. At our Structure 2010 conference, folks like VMware CEO Paul Maritz talked about the 10-year shift in the IT infrastructure. Early cloud doubters such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison are coming around and rethinking the opportunities being offered by the cloud. The venture capital community is sensing an opportunity and pumping dollars into the sector. But when you zero in, you can see that late-stage investors are willingly investing in companies that already have backing from the cream of the crop venture capital firms, such as Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.

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The identity of the strategic partner would make this round more interesting (and we are digging into it) because without this partner, Aster Data seems to be the only player without a date at the Big Data dance. EMC already snapped up GreenPlum. IBM and Netezza are tying the knot and will be fearsome competitors to Aster Data. On the upside, Aster has a new CEO, Quentin Gallivan, and it’s seen its sales double every year since 2008. The company counts MySpace, Barnes & Noble and Akamai (a AKAM) as its customers.

We wouldn’t be surprised if Hewlett-Packard or Teradata took a run at the company, which would justify the large sum of  money being pumped into it.

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When the company was smaller, I was very actively involved in our customer deployments. As the company scaled, I had to withdraw into operations. In my new role, I’ll be back doing tasks that I relish.

From his resume, it seems Gallivan might be the right man for the job as Aster starts to focus more on analytics for big data applications. The company finds itself in tough competition with the likes of Netezza and Teradata, as well as several startups. One of its closest competitors, GreenPlum, also shifted toward analytics, and as a result, was snapped up by EMC, a company known for its hard-charging sales approach.

It will be interesting to see if Gallivan can add some zest to Aster’s business. At the very least, after nearly 20 years in the software business, I’m pretty sure he can find a buyer for the company, which has raised more than $27 million in funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Cambrian Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners and JAFCO Ventures.

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