Teradata, which told us last week to "stop buying analytics," used its annual user conference this week to elaborate on that curious statement and explain its radical plan to dramatically simplify its customers' analytics investments through massive consolidation of its competitive offerings under its new Vantage data platform. To hear Teradata COO Oliver Ratzesberger explain it, top executives at Fortune 500 firms -- and the boards that hold their purse strings -- are simply fed up with big analytic investments that haven't panned out, and they're turning to Teradata for answers. "The last five to 10 years have been a curse and a blessing," Ratzesberger tells Datanami in an interview here at Teradata Analytics Universe in Las Vegas, Nevada, where approximately 3,000 Teradata customers, partners, and employees gathered for four-and-a-half days of training, education, and commiserating about failed analytic projects. "There are few executives left who don't say'I've spent billions of dollars. I have Vertica there, Hana there, Greenplum there. We bought a couple instances of Netezza. But IBM just de-released Netezza, Vertica just got sold a second time, Greenplum is now this open source thing. And Hadoop – well, that is going away.' "They're literally coming to us and saying'Give us a proposal to clean up the dozens of instances and consolidate them into one,'" Ratzesberger continues. "And what they quickly figure out is, if you can run it with a handful of systems, TCO [total cost of ownership] is orders of magnitude different, because the TCO in most organizations include 2,000 headcount to run all of these technologies, and 2,000 headcount is a lot of money." Ratzesberger says he recently spoke with the head of risk at one of the largest banks of the world who runs 800 separate systems designed to measure risk. All told, the various Python, R, Spark, and Hadoop systems cost the company $2 billion per year. "None of these other solutions are scalable to that regard.