Data warehouse pioneer NCR Corp reckons the data mining tools business is overcrowded, so it is ditching out of it in favor of third party tools. The company says as the number of data mining tool specialists increases, they begin to overlap its own research and development. Speaking at the company’s data warehousing conference in Vienna, Bill Eisenman, senior vice president of NCR’s Computer Systems group, said NCR would continue to partner data mining tool specialists, but would itself pull out of data mining development in the next three years. If we can get it from the open market, we don’t do it ourselves he said, indicating that NCR had originally invested in developing data mining tools because there had been a lack of competition in the field. Strangely, the statement was made as NCR launched three new data mining programs and two new data mining tools, designed to enhance customers’ return on information from its Teradata RDBMS data warehouse engine. Commenting on the statement Richard East, Director of Computing Strategy for NCR Europe, said NCR is determined to ensure that its customers get best of breed technology, and refined Bill Eisenman’s statement by saying that only if the best technology was available on the open market, would NCR not develop it itself. The three new programs are Business User Data Mining, which NCR claims enables users to exploit powerful data mining tools to extend the value of their data warehouse and is available now from $10,000 to $50,000, Departmental Data Mining, which answers specific departmental and functional business requirements and will be available in June at $150,000 to $450,000, and Enterprise Data Mining, available now from $500,000 to $2m. Two new data mining tools will be offered as part of those three solutions, Management Discovery Tool and Knowledge Discovery Workbench, which has been developed in close partnership with Integral Solutions, making use of its advanced technology and expertise. MDT is a business reporting tool offering change analysis, summarization, trend analysis, measure comparison and segment comparison. Knowledge Discovery Worker delivers data mining functionality through a visual programming environment offering integration into visualization, statistics, induction and neural networks.
