The Dozen 2003Teradata, a division of NCR Corp.Dayton, Ohio"It's alive!" Dr. Frankenstein exclaimed when he saw his creation respond to the fusion of brain with brawn. Ever since the beginnings of decision-support systems (DSS), database architects have dreamed of the day when their creations would awaken from a passive state to embody something quite different: an active, self-adjusting, intelligent system. That day is getting closer. Teradata, a division of NCR Corp., has been building toward this moment for a long time. In fact, so has its parent company: NCR actually acquired Teradata back in 1991, the same year that NCR was itself acquired by AT&T as the centerpiece of that company's ill-fated foray into the computer market. Teradata, one of the original "database machines" and featuring a distinctive parallel engine, was already the secret DSS weapon for a number of large corporations, particularly in retail. AT&T granted NCR independence in 1997, and the company's core focus since has been to provide solutions that "transform information into more enduring, more profitable relationships." Strategic IT's importance aims a bright spotlight on Teradata — finally. In DSS and business intelligence (BI), the 1990s were dominated by distributed data marts; line of business and departmental users wanted analytic capabilities without having to dance with IT. The resulting landscape — littered with data silos and unfulfilled expectations — has both users and IT thinking hard about the virtues of DSS consolidation. For Teradata, this means that the pendulum is swinging into its core area of strength. Sleeping Giant No More"Data transformation becomes much more interesting once you've got the data in the database, where you've got parallelism, scalability, and all the other desirable features," said Stephen Brobst, Teradata's CTO. "We need to take the data from a physically distributed world and bring it together so that you can do sophisticated analytics." And unlike competitive products that were built initially as OLTP engines and have had to use creative means to support DSS-style queries, Teradata has never had any conflict of interest. Now, the company is on a quest to expand analytic power by bringing data mining and other key analytic functions into the database engine. The added brainpower will meet up with technology enhancements in Teradata Warehouse 7.0 for "active" data warehousing to keep pace with demand for real-time BI, fresher data, and automated administration. Intelligent enterprises depend on a tight link between analytics and business processes, which means that the traditionally passive, batch-oriented mindset often won't cut it. Teradata, captain of many terabytes, is about to wake some sleeping giants. And Teradata deserves the Number One spot in the Dozen for 2003. MAJOR MOVES IN 2002· Named Mark Hurd, longtime head of Teradata division, to be COO of NCR · Released Profitability Analytics and Data Mining Accelerator packages · Introduced Teradata Warehouse 7.0, with upgraded database engine for "active" data warehouses INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISES· 3M, 2002 RealWare Award winner, uses Teradata and NCR WorldMark MPP hardware to drive enterprise BPM analysis · Medco Health, 2002 RealWare Award winner, analyzes millions of weekly prescriptions dispensed from a variety of sources
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