Los Angeles-based Teradata Corp is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and the fifth year since its first product shipment. Its current figures for the year to June 30 are also a cause for celebration with revenues for the fourth quarter up 70% to $50.5m producing profits up over 100% to $6.1m (CI No 1,228). The manufacturer of large-scale back-end parallel relational database processors, does most of its business at present in the retail, banking, telecommunications and airline sectors where confirming our assertion in CI No 1,228 – it says its only competitor is IBM’s DB2 product, although in the words of Teradata Europe Ltd’s marketing manager John Clements, at database sizes of 10Gb and above level Teradata has a unique solution with its DBC/1012 product. For while DB2 may outperform Teradata’s DBC for small databases, Clements claims that the DBC comes into its own in handling serious databases. Consequently, Teradata machines often sit alongside 3090s running DB2. At the moment the company is using disks from Control Data’s Imprimis Technology and from Hitachi Ltd, and it still has a lot of Fujitsu Ltd disks in stock from a previous agreement. Teradata attributes its latest fourth quarter financial success to the introduction of its Model 3 DBC/1012 in December which accounted for 85% of its revenues in that quarter. The Model 3 system has enabled the company to lower its manufacturing costs since, according to Teradata, it offers the processing power and storage capacity of the DBC/1012 at less than two-thirds the cost in a package one-third the size of an equivalent Model 2. As for the future, European manufacturing will soon begin in Dublin, and Teradata is working on the development of quicker transaction processing software to leave DB2 firmly in the shade. The company does of course have its alliance with FileTek Inc (CI No 1,170) to develop archival storage systems which will take it into the government and insurance sectors. FileTek is providing robotic sorters of optical disks (courtesy of Hitachi) which when combined with Teradata’s DBC/1012 can manipulate relational databases holding petabytes of data.
