With this week's Teradata Partners user event coming on the heels of Microsoft’s BI conference , comparisons are inevitable. Both events reported attendance of around 2500. Both focused on the evolution of their respective database platforms. Both mirrored the Zeitgeist: Microsoft handed out Palm Treos running Windows Mobile, letting attendees try mobile BI; Teradata went paperless for the first time--complete with recycled conference bags--and tracked attendees with RFID. And both acknowledged and subsequently marginalized the competition.

I’ve been to umpteen Teradata Partners conferences and there’s one sure thing: the raving fans. Teradata has the most loyal group of customers of any data warehouse vendor. These people are doing strategic and differentiating work with their data warehouses, and they’re smitten. Complementary CRM and supply chain solutions, industry data models, and BI partnerships enrich the Teradata product set and entrench the customer base.

Cynics cite Teradata’s early dismissal of the data warehouse appliance space, followed by a flurry of development activity culminating in the so-called Extreme Appliance, Teradata’s answer to Oracle’s Exadata, Netezza's data warehouse appliance, ParAccel’s Analytic Database, and Microsoft’s DATAllegro, among others.

But data warehouse appliance customers aren’t looking for business solutions, they’re looking for lower-cost platforms. The question isn’t whether Teradata can build its own appliance. It’s whether Teradata is ready to engage the commodity purchaser. A seasoned sales force accustomed to long sales cycles and high margins will need to adjust its high-end solution-focused pitch. And there’s an escalating emphasis on Teradata's professional services, which comprise a growing percentage of the company’s overall revenues.

So are things changing in the industry? Yep. The biggest change I’ve seen lately is a sea of Microsoft users watching a data warehouse process a trillion-row query in seconds. Startled by the explosion of business data at their companies, these people are lifting their heads from their SharePoint applications and waking up to the world of shared nothing and massively parallel. They are the data warehouse customers of the future.

The question is: Whose?

Technorati tag: Teradata Partners, Microsoft BI, Oracle Exadata, Paraccel, Paraccel Analytic Database, Netezza, Datallegro