We should have seen it coming, but Teradata announced its investment (11% acquired in September, 2010) in Aster Data is going to the level of acquisition.  Aster Data has an MPP implementation of a columnar data store and integration with MapReduce.  Teradata has been quiet on the columnar and MapReduce fronts and now we know why.  Columnar is undeniably important going forward into the analysis of massive data volumes.  Co-existence with row-oriented databases is already happening. 

We find MapReduce in those fringier cases where companies are going beyond needing to store human-generated structured data and into computer-generated data and unstructured data.  Started by Google and implemented by many who are Google-like in their need to manage data, MapReduce represents a new market.  It's one that is different from an EDW profile market where known queries against static data occur.  It's also one where many companies will find themselves in during  the next few years.  Teradata had already formed a relationship with Cloudera to acquire data from Cloudera's CDH platform.

A Teradata EDW and an Aster Data store could easily co-exist at a client and handle different workloads.  While both would have query workloads, Aster Data could use its advanced real-time data capture capabilities to feed summaries to the EDW.  Before I go too far with this, Teradata did say the code bases would be separate for the known future.  This is not dissimilar to Microsoft with their PDW (formerly the DataAllegro product).

You also need to recognize EMC (Greenplum), HP (Vertica), SAP (Sybase) and IBM (Netezza) mostly have multiple data stores, but all have analytic data stores on their hands!  Teradata already had other appliances, having spent the bulk of the last 2 years rolling out its appliance line.  And Aster Data was not just for Hadoop-level data need.  It's managing several single terabyte and below implementations.  The possibilities just with Teradata, the company, just exploded. 

After previous market activity like this, many a company's sales and marketing teams can get unfocused and even in serious competitive mode.  Teradata is very well run, but let's see if they can manage this challenge.

As Hadoop and its ecosystem matures, the game is changing from an era of not-enough to an era of plenty and a need to sort through the offerings.

Let us finally say Teradata is full stack and sees its immediate future as a full stack specialized player, alongside the better-known big players, offering an unparalled focus on information management.