Leveling up for the cloud

“Organizations need to become like sentient beings,” says Ashutosh Tiwary, Teradata vice president and general manager of cloud. “They need to make data and knowledge freely accessible and available to everyone so that insights can drive the business agenda.” He cites The Sentient Enterprise, a book co-authored by Teradata’s Chief Operating Officer Oliver Ratzesberger, which charts a course for business survival in an increasingly data-centric world.

In short, Teradata and the cloud are a perfect fit. But the company needed a little help speeding up its ambitious rollout of managed offerings across the leading public cloud platforms.

Tiwary approached Slalom with his vision for building an advanced cloud engineering organization at Teradata. Together, we hatched a plan to support and accelerate it in one of our regional product engineering centers. A Slalom team would begin developing a self-service management console for Teradata’s cloud service immediately and integrate Teradata recruits as the work unfolded.

Soon after, Abhishek Lal joined Teradata as director of product development for the cloud offering, initially working with an all-Slalom team.

“On day one, Slalom provided people that worked well with each other, were very, very skilled, and were ready to start building. As new people came on board, they could see that this was a modern software and cloud services build environment,” says Lal.

The extraordinary partnership continued for over a year, allowing Teradata to quickly build up its IntelliCloud service features and in-house team. Even after the new organization moved to its own space, a few people remained integrated in a Slalom team part-time and many IntelliCloud new hires spent time at Slalom as part of onboarding.

Close collaboration had the bonus benefit of setting Slalom up to rapidly explore new product ideas for Teradata. Over time, our engineers developed familiarity with Teradata’s technology stack and formed strong relationships across the company. The team also gained an understanding of the company’s customers and their needs.

The biggest win of the collaboration is the IntelliCloud Management Console. We helped Teradata design and build it for AWS – and then extend it for Azure.

The serverless architecture uses Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and other AWS services to build up the platform. Microservices enable customer definition, security, capacity monitoring, scaling up and down, metering, and everything else that Teradata customers can now manage with the console.

Building with serverless technologies requires a cultural shift. Traditionally, a separate organization would stand up the infrastructure and then the delivery team would build the application on it. With serverless, you have to think differently because the team is responsible for both developing the infrastructure as code and the applications as services.

Today, Teradata has a thriving cloud engineering organization spread across San Diego, Seattle, and Pune, India. IntelliCloud is getting rave reviews on AWS and will soon be released on Microsoft Azure. “Interest and adoption have exceeded my expectations,” says Lal.

The IntelliCloud Management Console has been so popular that customers are now requesting the same experience for their on-premises Teradata services. “Customers see it as the new way of working with their Teradata systems,” Lal explains.