Teradata (TDC) The Citigroup Global TMT Conference 2024 summary

Strategic transformation and vision

• Shifted from on-prem hardware to a cloud-first, software-centric model, building a $500M cloud business in four years.

• Focused R&D and investments on differentiated areas, emphasizing platform and partner-first strategies.

• Reduced services business to avoid competition with partners and enable ecosystem growth.

• Committed to innovation in hybrid and multi-cloud data platforms to meet evolving enterprise needs.

• Maintains a strong focus on trusted, ethical, and sustainable AI and analytics solutions.

Financial performance and guidance

• Returned to positive free cash flow and increasing operating margins, aiming for profitable growth.

• Lowered full-year guidance due to delayed deals and on-prem erosion, with ARR growth expected to resume in 2025.

• Implemented a 10% workforce reduction, restructuring sales and G&A to improve efficiency and margins.

• Cost actions allow reinvestment in innovation and maintaining acceptable EPS levels.

• Committed to returning at least 75% of free cash flow to shareholders.

AI, GenAI, and technology innovation

• Integrated advanced AI, ML, and analytics directly into the core database for scalable workloads.

• Demonstrated CPU-based language model performance exceeding GPU benchmarks in POCs with major banks.

• Focused on enabling production deployment of AI models at scale, addressing common data science project failures.

• Investing in open table formats and query engines to access vast data in object stores.

• Sees opportunity in supporting both large and small language models for diverse enterprise needs.