Technology environment is practical to us

Reporter: 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.

Reporter: 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 orginization 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. That is important to us.