INTERVIEW WITH MARK HURD, COO OF TERADATA
by Tim Staub, managing editor

DSstar: We've noticed at TDWI and other shows lately that your booths have a new look featuring the Teradata name. Can you tell us about this shift in branding?

HURD: NCR has decided to give even greater focus to its data warehousing and CRM business. In July 2000 NCR created two operating divisions within the company, with all data warehousing and analytical solutions under the Teradata Division. Then, earlier this year, we pushed the emphasis further by implementing a new branding approach for this business.

Following extensive research and analysis with customers, prospective customers and industry luminaries, we decided to create a new brand icon featuring the Teradata name and began identifying ourselves as "Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation." This will be the lead brand to promote our data warehousing and analytical solutions, projecting a technology-savvy, passionate, confident organization.

DSstar: Give us your view of the data warehousing market. What factors are driving your division's growth in this space?

HURD: If you take a look at the volatility in the marketplace today, where business cycles are compressing at an accelerated rate and investors are demanding growth, an executive's biggest challenge is making better decisions - faster and more efficiently. Executives are also desperate to push decision-making deeper in the organization in order to win and keep customers in today's frenetic competitive pace. There's no room for mistakes.

Teradata's strength lies in helping companies grow their business by enabling this "instant" decision-making environment. We accomplish this by first delivering powerful data warehousing and analytical solutions that offer a single view of the business across the enterprise. An integrated view is an extremely important first step, because all questions, no matter how complex, will result in more accurate decisions if they are analyzed against a single consistent view of the data.

The next step is to deliver power to the people - providing analysis capabilities throughout the organization that delivers quick, fact-based answers. Giving people the ability to take action based on facts, balancing very costly, sometimes sensitive issues is critical to nimble business performance.

Finally, for those companies ready for the new competitive frontier, Teradata solutions are ready to link the results of analysis with other business applications, automatically updating systems with new information that affects pricing, processes, logistics, and service. That's our vision for how business and decision-making will quickly evolve to succeed in the networked economy. The enabling technology environment is something we call active data warehousing.

DSstar: Tell us about the new data warehousing and CRM products and solutions we can expect to see coming from Teradata Division in the near future.

HURD: This spring we have a number of promising enhancements and additions to our solutions.

In March we announced the availability of Teradata CRM Version 4.0. This product integrates NCR's Relationship Optimizer product line with the analytics and campaign management products of Ceres, a company NCR acquired in April 2000. This new CRM product suite takes full advantage of the valuable customer information in a company's data warehouse, presenting marketers with analysis, action, evaluation and learning from within one tool.

In early April we launched the newest version of Teradata E-Business Analytics, which enhances BroadVision's suite of e-business applications. This product will allow businesses to tap into the information they gather from click stream analysis and transactions to provide personalized offers online.

Also in April we announced Teradata Warehouse 6.1, which includes our new Teradata Miner data mining software. This release provides additional capabilities for businesses to develop active data warehouses.

Active data warehousing is a new trend in decision support; it involves making the insights from the data warehouse available in real time to thousands of users.

DSstar: Tell us more about active data warehousing.

HURD: Active data warehousing is our vision for the future of decision support. We see a trend in data warehousing away from using these systems just to generate reports for top management. The future of data warehousing involves not only using the system for strategic decision-making but putting the company's data in the hands of front line employees, allowing them to make quick and informed decisions. To accomplish this, companies require a data warehouse that can load data quickly and handle thousands of complex queries coming from thousands of users.

Today we are helping customers implement data warehouses with these characteristics.

DSstar: Tell us about your customers? What industries do you target?

HURD: We've had a great deal of success with major global retailers, but we also have customers who are leading the banking, airline, telecommunications, insurance, manufacturing, energy, and entertainment industries, plus several of the most successful e-businesses.

Our customers include six of the top seven airlines, six of the top 10 retailers, six of the top nine communications companies, more than 40% of the largest US manufacturers and the world's leading banks.

These customers include Royal Bank of Canada, Delta Air Lines, Qantas, SBC, Taiwan Cellular, UnumProvident, Samsung Life Insurance, Edison Mission Energy, Harrah's Entertainment, Federal Express, Shanghai Stock Exchange, Travelocity, E*TRADE, and MatchLogic.

DSstar: Do you consider IBM and Oracle your main competitors? How do you stack up against them?

HURD: We do consider IBM and Oracle as our main data warehousing competitors, although we don't compete with them in every product area.

We feel we compare very favorably to these two competitors, especially when it comes to the ability to grow without boundaries. We are often brought in by companies to replace systems that were originally built on IBM or Oracle technology. Also, we feel we have an advantage in our specialization on data warehousing and decision support. Our competition doesn't have the same focus, evidenced by the fact they promote online transaction processing systems, which can't really handle the data loads or process the complexity of queries our database can.

We're especially proud of the industry recognition we've gained in the past year with our customers. The world's largest commercial Teradata user, SBC Communications, led five out of six categories in a recent database scalability survey by analyst firm Winter Corporation. The Data Warehousing Institute recognized Teradata customer Harrah's Entertainment as its 2000 Leadership in Data Warehousing Award winner.

DSstar: How would you summarize the benefits you bring to customers?

HURD: We help them drive growth. And we make them smarter with better decision-making against a single view of the business.

Contact Holly Michael, Teradata Public Relations, 937-445-6086, holly.michael@ncr.com.