About a year after he took over as President and CEO of US-based data management firm Teradata, Victor L Lund is taking the company through its next pivot, integrating new data management systems with its own legacy tools and creating a more hybrid environment for customers. In an interview with select journalists, Lund laid out his plans for the company.

The majority of your experience has been as an entrepreneur in the retail industry. How does your background influence what you're doing with Teradata?

I started as a CPA, but I decided I did not want to be the person who came in after the war was over and stabbed the wounded. I wanted to make things happen so I got involved in retail and over the course of my career, we (American Stores Company) grew from $1 billion in sales to $23 billion in sales. We sold the business in 1998 but I wasn ' t ready to retire. So I started doing different things and got involved at some level in technology. I became chairman of Demand Tec, a demand forecasting company which was sold to IBM. I also got involved in Bill Me Later, which is now a core part of Paypal. And then Teradata. I don't consider myself a technologist, I consider myself as a business user of technology. I'm not naive about technology. But if the last year has taught me anything, I said I wasn't a technologist and now it's clear that I'm not. What I've tried to bring in the last year to Teradata is business focus. What is it that our technology does and how do business users think about technology. What we do is bring technology to scale. We don't work with the top 500 companies by chance, we work with them because we do need scale. We are uniquely positioned for that sweet spot.

Who is the customer now to Teradata? And you've said earlier that Teradata lost its customer focus in the past?

We still have the CIOs as our customers. Teradata has always had a lot of consulting as part of our offering. But a lot of that was about meeting customers and bringing our technology to allow them to use it in ways they hadn't thought about.

When I got in, I found great people and great technology but we were in a stagnant period as a business. When I thought about it I realised that Teradata had such great technology that it made the company complacent. We thought our technology would drive us forever but if we don't move with things, then technology alone won't drive you forever. Previous managements at the company said when Hadoop and cloud started coming in, "They won't do what we do." While that may be true, these new technologies do what our customers want to do. And we had lost our focus on what the customer wanted. We were also very rigid on pricing, employment. We hung on to hardware as our key component when actually it is our software that is key. And that approach had ramifications. The world is littered by great companies that failed to change.

Is there still the challenge of the customer seeing Teradata as a data warehousing facility?

I believe that if we are solving the right issues, where reliability and predictability matters, Teradata is still the best place to store your data. We have to build the ecosystem so we can pull the data from where the customer wants it. We believe a portion of data will always reside on Teradata, especially as data grows. But the only way to get there is when customers believe that we bring the best to the business. We provide the best tools to bring the best outcomes for customers. Not everything needs to be on Teradata. Both CIOs and C-suite people I speak to, we talk about the business and where it's going. Coming from the outside, I'm stunned by the level of trust that customers have in us. We look at a problem and say "We're going to put open source on this, there's going to be a data lake. Some of this will be on our cloud, some of it maybe on AWS (Amazon Web Services). The interesting thing is how quickly data moves, even for very big customers, it's moving faster than they can keep up with. We bring that background and talk about business outcomes and prove to them what we can do. We brought our first open source product Kylo for data lake management two weeks ago, and now it's fully compatible with Teradata.

Looking forward, what are the specific industries and geographies you are looking at?

We are huge in finance and retail, we're big on manufacturing. The interesting thing that we and everybody else in the world would like to figure out right is healthcare. It's a regulated and fragmented industry, so it's hard. We do work with healthcare companies. You have the business side, which wants to look at costs, and the doctors' side, which wants to look at patient outcomes. And you have regulation on top of this. You need actionable data that will allow you to control cost without sacrificing patient outcomes. We're dabbling with artificial intelligence with customers in three different industries. We're doing things that people never thought Teradata can do. We've cut the number of people in the field down and we're putting more money in technology. I don't want to focus on geography in the literal sense but we have to keep in mind that size matters. So we can't do everything for everybody.

(The reporter was in Nice at the invitation of Teradata.)

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