Teradata Corp, the rapidly-growing Los Angeles company whose DBC 1012 back-end database systems are star performers in some of IBM’s more recurring nightmares, has signed a letter of intent to acquire one of the pioneers of back-end database systems, the Los Gatos, California-based ShareBase Corp company still much better know under its original name of Britton Lee Inc. Teradata plans to issue new shares to exchange for all the ShareBase out at a rate equivalent to 60 cents a share, valuing the firm at $6m. ShareBase was last on a roll way back in the early 1980s when it picked up some of the assets of the Insac British government software fiasco for a song, but the rise of the all-software relational database vendors tended to price its hardware-software systems out of the market. Teradata reckons the ShareBase products and technology provide it with a unique opportunity to enhance its client-server architecture. Loss-making ShareBase employs 150 and its sales had shrunk to $29m in 1989. NCR Corp said at the beginning of the month it would take 10% of Teradata to cement a joint development agreement (CI No 1,358).
