Suggesting that AT&T Co really is determined to make its acquisition of NCR Corp a success, it is to allow NCR to pay $520m in AT&T shares to acquire Teradata Corp, the back-end relational database processor company that, some observers have said, IBM fears more than any other. Under the merger agreement, each Teradata share would be exchanged for $30.25 of AT&T common and Teradata shares put on $5.125 to $28.875 on the news. The move is a strong one for AT&T: the phone company is its largest customer and bought $100m of its DBC-1012 database computers last year. NCR paid about $26m for 9% of Teradata in the form of new shares in March 1990 to cement the deal under which wanted to use Teradata’s Ynet interconnection for tying together the Intel Corp processors in its parallel database in its new top-end 3600 and 3700 machines: the 3600 has up to 288 processors and is held up by about six months. The 3700, with up to 1,000 Intel processors, is due out next year. Teradata has about 1,600 employees with operations in the US and 13 other countries, and lost $2.36m on sales of $257.8m for fiscal 1991 to June 30. The move is bad news for Amdahl Corp, because it suggests that AT&T will increasingly use NCR machines backed by Teradata database machines in its operations; AT&T is also Amdahl’s largest customer.
