My previous employer (Teradata) is a casualty of the public cloud providers. Teradata was once the dominate player in the data warehouse space. This is no longer the case. Both AWS and Azure are now the big gorillas in everything data and are attracting practically all of the new data-related projects from the largest businesses.
Both Amazon and Microsoft have edge computing offers that are tightly integrated with their AWS and Azure technologies. As a long time data and analytics employee I predict these big tech companies will be the eventual winners in the edge computing market.
Maybe Fastly and MDB will be exceptions but for this investor I’m staying away from all cloud infrastructure (edge or core) companies not named Amazon or Microsoft.
Reading your comments I’m trying to find something useful or actionable about it. A brief google search on Teradata led me to their Wikipedia page and their website, and both seem to imply that this is a pretty big company with a who’s-who list of partners in the analytics space. Teradata themselves seem to be more in the big-data storage sector and partner with analytics companies vs. being an analytics company themselves.
I didn’t see any indication from my 5 minutes of searching though, to suggest they’ve been a casualty of cloud providers. So I’m left wonder exactly why you claim that. What exactly have AWS or Azure done specifically to bring you to this understanding of where Teradata is currently? And why do feel that anything AWS or Azure are doing is a thread to “all cloud infrastructure” ? I ask this being a “cloud infrastructure” guy who uses AWS on a daily basis. And there are a ton of companies I see well worth investing in that AWS and Azure aren’t touching; MDB, AYX, ESTC, Fastly, all of them do very specialized things that none of the cloud providers do, and if they do, don’t do it well enough to matter to the core customers of any of these companies.
Your post comes across as that of someone who’s been wronged by AWS/Azure, and now has a grudge against them, and is therefore letting that color your investing strategy. Rather than understanding what each company does and why AWS or Azure won’t roll right over them, you seem to be painting every company operating anywhere near the cloud with the same broad brush of “Can’t compete with the behemoths!”.
Just my perspective. Perhaps I mis-read or mis-understood the point of your comments. If so, I apologize for any mis-characterization or incorrect assumptions I may have made.
Paul - who loves investing in companies benefiting from the clouds!
All of the newly IPO’d tech companies (ZM, FSLY, MDB, WORK, OKTA, etc. have the same challenge. They are specializing in an area that one of the three tech giants has an offering in. It’s possible they can all get crushed. But the tech giants can’t be best-in-class at everything. So the question about the success of these new companies will come to a few factors.
How fast can they grab the land: ZM is a great example of a company that through sheer luck has found themselves gobbling up users by the truckload, without increasing their marketing spend. If they can keep growing at this rate and gobble up enough users they gain an advantage.
Is their area best run by a neutral third-party: OKTA is great example of service that is best provided by a third-party. Identity products are most trusted when they are run by platforms that has no horse in the race when it comes to a specific service.
Transferability between giants: Fastly claims that this is an advantage, being able to use multiple cloud partners with a single edge CDN is an advantage. How strong of one, it remains to be seen. This might matter or it may not.
Product innovation: If these companies can keep delivering feature updates and stay ahead of the competition from MS, AMZN, or GOOG then they stand a good chance of out-innovating the giants. Someone let me run through MS Teams the other day, it’s definitely inferior to Slack.
The long term survival of these indies comes down to a combination of all the above and of course some luck. Tech moves fast and as the Teradata story shows even mastering all of these may not be enough. Even LinkedIn was eventually bought by Microsoft, but they had a great run.
I work in a tech role for a Fortune company. We just moved to Zoom and are moving away from Skype. We also use Azure, OKTA, ServiceNow. My last company used AWS.
ZM is a great example of a company that through sheer luck has found themselves gobbling up users by the truckload
I don’t know that I would refer to COVID-19 as “luck”, but regardless I think the real point is that the product’s ease of use and quality of delivery were the key enabling factors and that is not just “luck”.
Only one data point, I know, but I work for one of the worlds largest banks and we are moving from Teradata to GCP as the Teradata license costs are exorbitant. The on-demand nature of cloud technology just makes everything more cost-efficient.
Also, in my organisation last year we were moving just UI code to the cloud. This year we are starting to move data and some back-end processing. If this is typical, then there are many years of growth left for cloud adoption.