Seven West Media drops Teradata in intelligence layer modernisation

Seven's data and growth director Andrew Brain (left) with colleague and head of AI audience analytics Richard Whitworth (right).
itnews.com.au

Seven West Media has ended its long-standing supplier relationship with Teradata for data management as it chases a deeper and more predictive understanding of its audiences.

The company has migrated data from across its media divisions out of its Teradata Vantage Cloud SaaS environment to a new architecture combining its existing Salesforce and Databricks tools with Snowflake, ending the last vestige of a technology partnership that stretched back over a decade.

iTnews has confirmed that Seven’s relationship with Amazon Web Services, which hosted the Vantage Cloud managed data service, remains intact with the migration taking place within its hosting environment.  

Director of data and growth Andrew Brain told iTnews that the Teradata offering was suited to Seven’s need a decade ago: data storage and collection for reports.

“Teradata was built for exactly that world. But today, data is expected to do far more than tell us what happened yesterday.

“It needs to help us understand audiences, power AI and machine learning for prediction analysis, work seamlessly with advertisers and create new commercial opportunities.

"We didn't want a platform that simply stored data. We wanted a platform that helped us put data to work.

"As you would expect, our audience data is incredibly valuable, but its value grows exponentially when it can be connected with other datasets,” Brain said.

Speaking at a Snowflake customer event in Sydney last week Brain was more specific about the challenge that Seven was facing with competition for eyeballs in the streaming market being made fiercer by international entrants.

“Three or four years ago, it was 7plus, it was 9now, it was 10play, it was SBS on demand – that was our competitive landscape. Now we're actually competing with these global platforms: the Netflix[es], the Paramounts, even the Samsungs and the LGs have got TV channels. News Corp launched Tubi. These are fast platforms, free ad-supported TV.

“This is our battleground and we know if we're going to compete in this battleground, we have to understand that we've got AI and machine learning tools to help us compete, so we can understand those audiences even better than we've ever done before,” Brain said.

Seven told iTnews that its relationship with Teradata had evolved through a number of manifestations since 2015, starting with a managed services contract for a DIY cloud architecture hosted in AWS which, it said, back then was “still considered an on-premises deployment”.

At the time, its digital audience data was still jointly controlled with Yahoo! through its Yahoo7 partnership, with select datasets provided back to Seven via Acxiom.

After the Yahoo7 partnership dissolved, Seven started sunsetting third-party controlled environments for its audience and taking greater control.

In 2022, Seven started transitioning away from Teradata’s managed services, bringing control and responsibility for its data warehouse back in-house.

In 2023 it changed course again, migrating back to Teradata Vantage but this time as a fully managed cloud-native SaaS deployment, completing the shift during 2024.

“This marked Seven's move from a traditional data warehouse operating model to a more modern cloud-based platform,” Seven said.

It’s understood that AWS had also been supplying Seven's content delivery network with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) providing some AI and analytics.

Now, Seven’s migration from Teradata to a new hybrid architecture - of Snowflake, Databricks and Salesforce - will remove “a bottleneck regarding legacy technology”, Brain told iTnews.

“Data often had to be copied, moved, integrated and governed across multiple environments. It's no secret that Snowflake changes that dynamic and it means organisations can securely collaborate while keeping control of their own data (and zero copy) and we can move much faster from integration conversations to insight and activation,” he explained.

“Activation” refers to a broad category of marketing strategies that aim to motivate audiences to take some of form of action to interact with brands and advertisers. Deeper audience insights and segmentation help media companies identify viewers that are mostly likely to respond.

“With Snowflake, Databricks and Salesforce we've created a modern intelligence layer that makes data easier to access, easier to share and easier to activate. These three give us the foundation to accelerate everything from audience insights and personalisation through to machine learning and next-generation AI products,” Brain said.

Seven announced its partnership [pdf] with Databricks in 2024, at the time describing the move as opening an “AI factory”. Seven embedded Databricks cloud and data specialist at its Seven’s Sydney office to start testing and building generative AI tools.

The media company said that the partnership aimed to boost “Seven’s digital engagement, audience understanding and advertising strategies across its 7plus video streaming platform and 7NEWS digital platforms”.

Single view of media audience

Brain said that about 12 months ago Seven had to “answer some critical questions” around replacing its legacy technology.

The goal, he said, was to get a comprehensive view of its media audience, which has recently grown in reach to 20 million following Seven West Media’s merger with radio network, Southern Cross Austereo.

Seven’s head of AI, audiences and analytics Richard Whitworth, who was also speaking at the Snowflake event, said the media company brought in outside consultants to assess the AI and analytics capabilities of five providers: Databricks, AWS, GCP, Teradata and Snowflake.

After four weeks they eliminated Teradata, AWS and GCP options, leaving Snowflake and Databricks – the latter of which was now already supplying technologies well-established in the company.

Whitworth said that Seven had some initial concerns about adding Snowflake to its technology stack, fearing that it might undo years of work that they had already done with Databricks.

“We've been a Databricks shop for three-to-four years, and we said, ‘We're still building on this. [If] we bring in someone else, are we going to have to rebuild everything that we've done?’ That was something that kind of put a pause [on it] for us,” he said.

However, he said those concerns dissipated after the company consulted with other large organisations that were already using the two vendors' platforms in tandem.

Whitworth said that staying with Teradata was “off the table”. However, that also meant that missing the three-month deadline to avoid renewal was also non-negotiable.

“A 10-year-old legacy platform is just breaking. We couldn't get anything out of it, so it was the best decision. But it was also the hardest decision that we had to make because it was a three-month migration.

“We couldn't take the warehouse out for three months and do the migration. It had to still be performing during the three months. It still had to deliver the [business as usual] enterprise reporting, activation ... all of that still had to work while the migration was happening,” he said.

The migration

Seven completed the migration from Teradata to Snowflake over 12 weeks between April and June this year, moving 6200 database objects and “hundreds” of critical workloads using Snowflake Cortex to accelerate code conversions.

Whitworth said that the move off the Teradata ecosystem to "Snowflake-native execution" had given Seven's daily data processing a nine-fold speed increase.

“Even though we did have Databricks and we were innovating, everything had to funnel back into data into Teradata in terms of ... the activations. And no matter what we were doing, it was such a big bottleneck. We really realigned that data foundation in terms of you know bringing Snowflake in,” he said.

Seven had already been using Salesforce Data Cloud and Salesforce CRM. Whitworth said that as part of the migration, Seven is now planning to upgrade to Salesforce Data 360, to sit above and connect those platforms.

Brain said that the new ecosystem, which he likened to a business transformation, would allow Seven to provide brands and advertisers with more granular insights into its audience behaviour.

Seven has amassed a large audience through its acquisitions, but Brain said that “good old-fashioned reach” wasn’t necessarily what advertisers “want or need”.

“Advertisers want to understand the data that you have on your audiences. They want to understand the deterministic data. They want to understand the modelling you're doing with that data moving forward. For us, our focus has had to be on AI and [machine learning],” he said.