Blog: Jill Dyche

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Teradata Comes Back Around

In which Jill goes to work for a start-up, and they both survive.

In 1985 I went to work for a technology start up. I’d left a job with a well-established high-tech firm to take the plunge with a fledgling database machine company that was doing innovative work with massively parallel technology. Friends called me crazy. All I knew is that I’d left a big company, agreeing to take less money and more stock options from a tiny firm started by a guy in a Santa Monica garage. I think I threw up when I signed the offer letter.

The mid-1980s at Teradata was a heady time. There were 12-hour days, beer, doorway design sessions, parking lot volleyball, beer, moment’s-notice travel assignments, paintball, beer, and an esprit de corps that transcended culture, cementing the company’s very brand. Teradata developers, far from being hidden in the subterranean alleyways of headquarters, were revered and executives let the light shine brightly on them. Between executive briefings with the likes of Citibank and AT&T—enterprises beleaguered by large transaction volumes and struggling to understand their businesses—we’d go on midnight grunion runs at Playa del Rey, then back to work to fling a little more code or finish the manual, then reconvene to devour sweet shrimp (with heads) at O-Sho. Hard work was in our DNA. Most of us were young, cutting our teeth on cutting edge technology by day, and partying like rock stars (albeit poor ones) by night. We merged, de-coupled, re-normalized, and disaggregated—and I’m not talking about data.

Because of Teradata I designed one of the world’s first terrorism databases, took a coma query from minutes to seconds, christened my favorite London pub, deconstructed balance sheets, learned the words to "Rocky Top," built data models sans dangling foreign keys, learned to love—and then hate—Sambuca, saw the High Atlas mountains at twilight, and delivered customer profiles before they were a gleam in Tom Siebel’s eye. Because of Teradata I forged permanent friendships, sat at the feet of the masters, and met my mate.

I left Teradata in 1991, before the AT&T acquisition that eventually made Teradata a subsidiary of NCR. When I left, Teradata was still independent. This week Teradata is independent once more. The stock ticker is TDC. Congratulations to the new company, and to the old company, and to the pioneers who built them both.

Technorati tag: Teradata, Teradata spinoff, data warehouse pioneer

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