Trivial Pursuit, The Village People and Teradata Turn 25; Teradata Marks Milestone Bringing Enterprise Data Warehousing to Life

Business Wire, Oct 13, 2004

SEATTLE -- Twenty-five years ago the first game of Trivial Pursuit was played, the Walkman made its debut, designer jeans were all the rage and Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation (NYSE:NCR) transformed the way business decisions are made.

As The Village People sang "YMCA," Teradata became the first to urge business and government organizations to collect their data in one place and reuse it for better, faster decision making. From modest beginnings in a Brentwood, Calif., garage Teradata has become the world leader in enterprise data warehousing, serving the "who's who" of business in over 100 countries and territories with more than 750 customers and 1,200 installations, including British Airways, China Mobile, Continental Airways, Dell, Deutsche Post, FedEx, France Telecom, Harrah's, National Australia Bank, SBC, Travelocity, the U.S. Air Force and Wal-Mart.

"In the late 1970s, people still couldn't see clearly how business was done. Our insight was that, with the right approach to information, people could make decisions on a daily basis or even a moment-by-moment basis rather than 'by guess and by gosh,'" said Phil Neches, Teradata co-founder and first chief scientist. Teradata's founders had the foresight to design a revolutionary relational database management system for parallel processing with multiple microprocessors, specifically for decision support.

Today, Teradata(R) outperforms its competitors and can scale simultaneously across multiple dimensions to keep up with business demands: more users, more data, more complexity, mixed workloads, data "freshness" (business events visible immediately), high availability, high performance (response times in milliseconds) and query freedom. With Teradata, millions of users can access petabytes of data.

"As enterprise analytics moves to the top of companies' priority lists, Teradata continues to invest in research and development to stay on the leading edge of helping business and government solve complex problems," said Alan Chow, senior vice president, Teradata research and development. "Today's release of Teradata Warehouse 8.0 reinforces our commitment to leadership by being the first to deliver active data warehousing to enable operational decision-making and strategic decision support -- all from a single view of the business within the enterprise."

What does the future hold for enterprise analytics? "I think the ability to acquire data in real-time and do event-based decision-making will become mainstream. The storing of unstructured data in relational database management system products will grow dramatically, given the low cost of disk space," said Teradata chief technology officer, Stephen Brobst.

According to Teradata's third annual decision-making survey, demand for information is seemingly insatiable. Comparing year over year, 98 percent of executives surveyed report that data is increasing, 75 percent say the number of daily decisions is increasing and over half say decisions are more complex. The School of Information Management and Science at the University of California at Berkeley estimates the world is producing approximately 5 exabytes of information per year. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. An exabyte is equivalent to all words ever spoken by human beings.

About Teradata Division

Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation (NYSE:NCR), is the global technology leader in enterprise data warehousing, analytic applications and data warehousing services. Organizations around the world rely on the power of Teradata's award-winning solutions (www.teradata.com) to get a single, integrated view of their business to enhance decision-making, customer relationships and profitability.

About NCR Corporation

NCR Corporation (NYSE:NCR) is a leading global technology company helping businesses build stronger relationships with their customers. NCR's ATMs, retail systems, Teradata(R) data warehouses and IT services provide Relationship Technology(TM) solutions that maximize the value of customer interactions and help organizations create a stronger competitive position. NCR (www.ncr.com) is based in Dayton, Ohio.

NCR and Teradata are trademarks or registered trademarks of NCR Corporation in the United States and other countries.