Intelligent Enterprise

An important event for Teradata occurred recently when it completed its spin out from its parent company, NCR. This milestone was over a year in the making and gives Teradata the ability to more independently operate as a public entity. The company also announced third-quarter revenue of $375 million, which puts it well on the way to being a $1.5 billion technology provider in 2007.

I'm sure you all know the Teradata brand and its dedicated focus on data warehousing, but the company has also been building — through acquisition, organic efforts and partnerships — a robust set of analytics solutions that span line-of-business and vertical industries. In October, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) won the Financial Performance Management Leadership Award from Ventana Research on the strength of its ability to meet deep, domain-specific customer requirements — a capability richly supported by Teradata.

Teradata has built its strong position on customer loyalty, dedicated solutions and a services organization that is well respected in the industry. Others, like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, have tried to attack and diminish Teradata for more than a decade with little success. In October at the Partners Conference run by the Teradata user group, there were many key announcements, including a green initiative for energy-efficient hardware. Teradata CEO Mike Koehler and SAS CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight announced future integrations of their respective technologies. The results of the latter announcement will take time to determine as it hinges on future technology releases by both organizations.

Teradata has tough choices to make as the rest of the BI market is being consolidated by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This will place more pressure on Teradata to provide deeper BI solutions that compliment its platform. Now that the company is a public entity that has more direct control over its destiny, there are many M&A; options with other global providers, like Actuate, Information Builders, MicroStrategy and many smaller technology suppliers that are all great candidates. Of course, Teradata will not be alone, as HP may also get into the BI market to reenergizing their competition with Teradata in data warehousing. And then there's IBM, which just announced its planned acquisition of Cognos.

With the Teradata's improvements in total cost of ownership over the last several years, customers are gaining significant benefits and ROI from deployments. In short, Teradata is a tiger to be reckoned with and has some new choices and opportunity ahead.

Mark Smith is CEO And Senior Vice President of Research at Ventana Research. Write to him at mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com.