NCR Details Teradata Spinoff, Launches Green Data Warehouse

Published: August 30, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in January, NCR announced that it was going to break itself into two pieces--one that makes automatic teller machines and other electronic self-service devices and other electronics gear and one that makes the Teradata hardware and software for supporting large data warehouses. The plans for the spinoff for Teradata were announced this week.

Bill Nuti, who took control of NCR as president and chief executive officer in the wake of Mark Hurd's departure to become president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard in March 2005. Nuti is keeping his job at NCR, and Mike Koehler, who is currently senior vice president of the Teradata Division, is going to be president and CEO of that separate company. Teradata accounts for about a quarter of NCR's overall sales, which hit $6.1 billion in 2006. NCR acquired Teradata in December 1991 for $520 million in AT&T stock. (AT&T had earlier that year bought NCR in an ill-fated partnership for $7.6 billion; by January 1997, a struggling AT&T spun NCR off to its freedom.)

The Teradata spinoff will be done on September 30, with each NCR shareholder getting a share of Teradata stock. (The company is being spun off so NCR does not have to pay capital gains taxes on a sale, apparently.)

In the meantime, it is business as usual at Teradata, which ships its eponymous data warehousing database and management software on a homegrown variant of Unix as well as on Linux or Windows on X86 and X64 platforms. The latest addition to the family is the Teradata 5500 Server, which runs Teradata Warehouse 8.2. The server is based on Intel's "Woodcrest" dual-core Xeon 5100 processors, and it supports NCR's own 32-bit System V Unix variant as well as 64-bit versions of Linux and Windows Server 2003.

By moving to the Woodcrest chips and a new server design, NCR says that a data warehouse can use up to 75 percent less electricity for power and cooling as an equivalent data warehouse built from NCR gear three to five years ago. The Teradata 5500 Server is a cluster of servers that allows a data warehouse to scale from hundreds of gigabytes to 4 petabytes. Prior generations of Teradata servers can be mixed into the cluster.

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