Teradata Corp, the Los Angeles company whose name should be spelled Terrordata if the anecdotal evidence that that is what its products inspire in IBM is to be believed – is phenomenally active at the moment, both consolidating its position in the back-end database engine market and forging ahead with research and development in order to remain in pole position against whatever surprises IBM or the Oracle-NCube parallel processing development venture may throw at it. The company recently acquired ShareBase Corp (CI No 1,457) in a deal that was mutually beneficial. ShareBase, probably better known as Britton-Lee Inc, was in financial difficulties and looking for a partner. Teradata, like all companies in the database market facing the commoditisation of their product, is anxious to offer users access to its machines from as wide a range of systems as possible – ShareBase had put a lot of money into the development of its ANSI SQL implementation and claims to have a very advanced query optimiser with a capability running to 10 or 12 joins.
Obsessive
So it was that the two companies came together. Within Europe the ShareBase name has disappeared completely as the company has been integrated into Teradata’s open systems division (the division is concerned with database communications, not Unix), and ShareBase’s Jan Nordhagen is now heading up this division. In the US, however, where ShareBase is a much bigger operation, the two businesses will be kept separate for the next year. Aside from SQL database access tools, the ShareBase acquisition brings Teradata a sizable mid-range user-base. For the ShareBase Server/8000 tends to serve the DEC VAX market, whereas Teradata, which traces its ancestry back to Citicorp’s obsessive experimentation with every conceivable type of computer in the mid-1970s, plays in the IBM mainframe field. Therefore, the two companies have quite different territories although there is a natural overlap in their user base. For example, AT&T uses products from both, and Nordhagen hopes that the fact that ShareBase has won deals with local telecommunications carriers such as Hull-based Kingston Communications Plc, while Teradata serves the large telecommunications carriers, means that Teradata will strengthen its hold on the telecom market. Nordhagen also believes that the acquisition is good news for ShareBase users because there is now a clear upgrade path for them, so that they no longer have to go to DB2 on an IBM 3090 to grow. –
In the present state of the IBM mainframe market, where even IBM itself is finding it difficult to squeeze more than a percentage point or two of growth a year, you have to have a pretty special product to become one of the fastest growing companies in the computer industry – but that is the trick pulled by Teradata Corp, the company whose hot property is the DBC1012 back-end database processor – or parallel hardware serach engine. Teradata uses a whole bank of Intel 80386 processors to search a vast disk farm at lightning speed – and some of the bluest of blue chips, particularly in the banking and financial community have convinced themselves that the company has come up with that elusive better moustrap and have been beating a path to the company’s door. The company has reached a size where it needs one or two other strings to its bow, and Katy Ring has been hearing about its plans. -However, Teradata’s UK and Canadian managing director, John Clements, says that the acquisition was in no way a defensive move against the possibility that IBM may soon announce a dedicated DB2 processor. If it does announce such a processor, Clements sees this as an endorsement of Teradata’s DBC product, but he personally believes that IBM will not make such an announcement – he thinks that an enhanced DB2 will be offered via tweaks in Enterprise Systems Architecture and greater function in 3390 disk controllers. As for the development of the DBC1012, in the hardware stakes, Teradata is happy to follow the path mapped out by Intel Corp and will move from the 80386 to the 80486 in the fu
llness of time – Clements has also seen the specifications for the 80586 chip and says that Teradata is pleased with Intel’s progress, as it gives the company a cost-effective way of producing more performance. Teradata also has a deal with Charles River Data Systems (CI No 1,324) for a Unix processor based on the 80486, which means that the front end of the DBC will be programmable. At present disk drives come from Seagate Technology, although Clements says that Teradata is always evaluating high performance drives from a variety of vendors.
Petabytes
The company’s deal with FileTek Corp to develop an optical disk processor for archival storage (CI No 1,170) is about to come to fruition with a product installed in three US sites for beta testing, capable of storing up to 3Pb – three petabytes of data – petabytes come after terabytes, which come after gigabytes which come after megabytes: each is 1,000 times bigger than the one before. Then there is the agreement with NCR Corp, which was sealed by NCR taking a 10% stake in Teradata (CI No 1,398). NCR needed to collaborate with Teradata to enhance its multi-processor technology, which currently uses a master-slave architecture, whereas its competitors have opted for shared memory symmetrical multi-processing. In return Teradata gained research and development skills from NCR into parallel processing and disk arrays. However, from Teradata’s point of view, a big incentive for the deal was NCR taking a 10% stake, since that investment gives Teradata around $40m to fund further development, thereby securing the future of the next but one generation of its DBC products.
