Teradata (NYSE: TDC) announced its first serverless AI/ML engine in the cloud, called Teradata AI Unlimited. The new offering, unveiled today at Microsoft Ignite, is natively integrated into Microsoft Fabric and OneLake, which is Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake. By allowing data scientists, data engineers and developers to seamlessly explore and discover innovative new use cases, on-demand and using data at scale, Teradata AI Unlimited enhances historical data platforms and is designed to make AI innovation faster, easier, and more cost-effective.
 
The seamless integration of Teradata AI Unlimited with Microsoft Fabric helps data innovators to operate at their best – with access to vast amounts of data and unlimited flexibility to explore, create and experiment. AI Unlimited compliments the mission critical Teradata VantageCloud system managed by IT, expanding governed access to data and ClearScape Analytics to enable new patterns of innovation via free-flowing trial and error without the fear of cost overruns.
Teradata AI Unlimited maintains Teradata commitment to an open and connected ecosystem, offering the right tools required for design and iteration of analytical models – speeding the release of new products that leverage AI. When a prototype is ready, it can be smoothly transitioned into a production VantageCloud environment, a unique capability that can make AI enablement a reality.

“The ability to explore, experiment and operationalize new use cases for AI initiatives without risk or restraint – especially on a platform as powerful as Teradata’s – is a dream come true for data scientists, data engineers, and developers. Teradata AI Unlimited makes this possible while also supporting the goal of enabling AI – driving massive enterprise value and breakthrough business results,” said Hillary Ashton, Chief Product Officer at Teradata. “We couldn’t be happier to be working with Microsoft to deliver this AI engine for Microsoft Fabric and we are committed to helping our customers build workloads that leverage the full Microsoft ecosystem, from Microsoft OneLake to Azure ML and Azure Open AI Services.”

Teradata AI Unlimited for Microsoft Fabric
Teradata AI Unlimited features the industry’s leading analytics capabilities in a self-service environment through Microsoft Fabric, with native integration to the Microsoft ecosystem. Users can set up and deploy best-in-class analytics from both providers in minutes and access all shared storage in OneLake. This is designed to eliminate expensive data movement and time-consuming data infrastructure management, allowing users to focus on innovating and driving business success.
“Teradata AI Unlimited adds depth to Microsoft Fabric by adding a powerful AI/ML engine to the end-to-end analytics we offer on the platform,” said Arun Ulagaratchagan, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data at Microsoft. “Together, Microsoft and Teradata
make it easier for customers to meet extensive analytics requirements and gain more powerful insights through creative use of AI.”

Key Features of Teradata AI Unlimited

• Flexible and powerful capabilities for AI use cases: With Teradata AI Unlimited natively operating within Microsoft Fabric, users can explore, experiment, and operationalize AI projects at unlimited scale by leveraging a secure and seamlessly integrated ecosystem.

  Teradata delivers parallel processing, the ability to build and run models, and operationalize models at scale. Users can access data in OneLake, Microsoft’s Open Table Format (OTF) service offering. AI Unlimited also supports Open File Formats such as Parquet and CSV with access from Jupyter Notebook, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, or Microsoft Excel.

  Data scientists, data engineers, and developers can leverage native integration with Python to call analytics functions, execute Python code, and import Python models directly into Teradata AI Unlimited. This enables users to leverage their language and tools of choice.

  By connecting the AI engine with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, users can leverage large language models (LLM) to deliver analytic outcomes, such as next best action, digital journey, and sequencing for product recommendations. With bring-your-own-model (BYOM) capabilities, Teradata AI Unlimited seamlessly enables users to operationalize any model trained by Azure’s multiple Machine Learning (ML) services - all executing and dynamically managed at scale to drive innovation.

• Spin up in minutes, move into production when ready: With Teradata AI Unlimited, users get a serverless user environment that is transparently provisioned and accessed within Microsoft Fabric. Users can explore data where it lives in Microsoft OneLake and avoid the time, complexity, and cost of moving data, integrating various data services or managing data infrastructure. It also means users have the freedom to experiment without impacting a mission-critical production environment.

  At any time, users can smoothly transition and operationalize a prototype into a VantageCloud production environment. Teradata AI Unlimited allows users to focus on creating more business value for their organization by deriving insights from large amounts of data instead of managing data infrastructure.

• Minimize costs and drive value: Users directly access Teradata AI Unlimited natively within Microsoft’s Fabric ecosystem and pay only for what they need through a consumption model based only on the time spent.

Availability
Teradata AI Unlimited is available today in private preview through Azure Marketplace for select customers. The AI engine will be available within Microsoft Fabric in Q2 2024.
About Teradata
At Teradata, we believe that people thrive when empowered with better information. We offer the most complete cloud analytics and data platform, including for AI. By delivering harmonized data and trusted AI/ML, we enable more confident decision-making, unlock faster innovation, and drive the impactful business results organizations need most.
See how at Teradata.com.