Teradata taps Anaconda to add Python, R packages to VantageCloud Lake

Teradata is partnering with Anaconda to add packages of popular programming languages Python and R to its multi-cloud analytics platform offering, VantageCloud Lake.

The partnership will see Teradata integrate the packages from Anaconda’s repository into its self-service data analytics offering, ClearScape Analytics, which comes packaged inside VantageCloud Lake.

The integration will allow enterprises to deploy and operationalize artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tasks faster, the company said, adding that enterprises that already subscribe to VantageCloud Lake will be able to download Python and R packages from Anaconda’s repository at no additional cost.

The Anaconda partnership will help data professionals already working on Teradata’s offering to simplify the provisioning and management of supporting frameworks and libraries currently being uses, said Bradley Shimmin, chief analyst at Omdia.

“The provisioning of supporting frameworks and managing interdependencies between packages is a messy business and Anaconda can simplify that,” Shimmin explained.

Teradata’s move to partner with Anaconda is a matter of the company following the market trend of similar vendors pivoting hard towards multi-model analytic insight platforms (data warehouses or data lakehouses) that enable enterprises to build AI outcomes right on top of the data without moving that data, Shimmin said.

“It just makes sense in terms of improving performance, lowering cost, and decreasing complexity,” he said, adding that such offerings from vendors are still maturing, especially when it comes to adding tools needed to  perform data science tasks without needing to switch to an external platform, such as SageMaker or DataRobot.

Teradata already had support for Python and R

Teradata already had support for Python and R through ClearScape Analytics, according to Constellation Research’s principal analyst Doug Henschen.

“The reason behind the Anaconda partnership could be the repository provider’s  super-extensive library and very broad adoption,” Henschen said.

In contrast to Henschen, Omdia’s Shimmin said that Anaconda’s repository itself faces stiff competition and “most data professionals opt for classics, such as pyenv, to do their pip (preferred installer programme) installs, or incorporate relatively new tools, such as Poetry, to do the same thing.”

Teradata is the not the only company adopting Python. Rival Snowflake has partnered with Anaconda to integrate Python into Snowpark.

Anaconda itself has partnerships with the likes of IBM’s RedHat and Cloudera for its programming language packages.

The packages for Python are available immediately, and the packages for R will be released before the end of the year, Teradata said.