NAB live-streamed the end of its Teradata platform, thousands tuned in

National Australia Bank live-streamed the shutdown of its Teradata platform at the end of last year to an audience of “thousands” that either had connections to the platform or the program to retire it.

The bank’s data platforms executive Joanna Gurry told the Databricks Data+AI Summit in San Francisco last month that the stream was set up to mark the end of one system - Teradata - and the start of another - Ada, which has Databricks at its core.

Gurry noted that after 26 years, Teradata was “deeply ingrained in a lot of the marketing and credit card operations” of the bank.

“We have a lot of team members that are really deeply connected with the heritage of our existing systems, and they find it really confronting to move on,” she said.

“It was almost like a shock to them when we said that we were going to change technologies.

“These are the people that we're relying on to do really big important things like decommission Teradata and some of the other historical systems that we have.”

Gurry said the bank’s chief data and analytics officer Christian Nelissen came up with the idea of live-streaming the end of Teradata and the cut-over to having Ada serve that functionality instead.

“We had a film crew go down to the data centre and we live-streamed the shutting down of Teradata,” she said.

“We thought that there was one [cabinet] and we would just pull the plug and the balloons would go up, but in fact there were five separate cabinets, so it played out for a while.

“But the team leads that did that were in the data centre on the day and the data centre protector was there in all of his kit and he would go behind one cabinet at a time and say, ‘Now we're going to turn off cabinet number one’, and he turned it off and you could see this kind of eye blinking at the front and then suddenly the power would go out and the light would die. 

“It was kind of like watching the Terminator die five times in a row.”

Gurry expressed surprise “at the excitement” the live-streaming exercise generated.

“Thousands of people who were kind of on the periphery of the project actually tuned in and watched that live stream,” she said.

The stream also showed to staff in real-time that Ada could pick up where Teradata left off.

“You can tell people about the journey, and you can assure them that it's all going to work, and you can try and convince them to just trust in the process and things will just flow through, but sometimes you actually have to show them,” she said.

Ry Crozier attended the Databricks Data+AI Summit in San Francisco as a guest of Databricks.