NCR Corp says it is formalizing its existing relationship with Microsoft Corp in the areas of server technology and data warehousing, and has signed a five-year cross-patenting agreement to share related technologies. And like Hewlett-Packard Co, Unisys Corp, Digital Equipment Corp and Amdahl Corp before it, NCR also said it would expand its NT services and support business. It will train 1,000 consultants as Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers over the next two years, and will jointly fund an Enterprise Solution Center in South Carolina along with ten client centers worldwide. The two are working together on integrated data warehousing, electronic commerce and high availability technology, with NCR engineers working over at the Microsoft campus in Redmond. NCR is already in the process of porting its flagship Teradata database over to NT, and should have the single node version for NT ready by mid year. NCR is concentrating on tightly integrating Teradata with Microsoft’s SQL Server at the low-end so that it can take advantage of and co-market Microsoft’s Site Server, Internet Information Server and other Back Office components. Ports of its Bynet parallel interconnect technology are further down the line (CI No 3,341). NCR says it won’t compromise Teradata through the integration process with SQL, keeping it very similar if not identical to Unix versions, through the operating system independent layer it’s currently developing. It hopes that layer will at last lay rest to critics who call Teradata proprietary technology, and pitch it into more direct competition with the likes of Oracle Corp and Red Brick Systems Inc. Integration with SQL will center around fast replication, OLE-DB- and OLE-DB of OLAP enablers, and metadata definitions. The Life Keeper high availability software and Top End transaction processing will be NCR’s value-add to NT, above and beyond Microsoft Transaction Server and Cluster Server. Next quarter, it will release a customer relationship management under its RightStart data warehousing program, and a High-Availability Internet Server is also planned, using clustered NT servers, Internet Information Server and Site Server 3.0 Commerce Edition. Tailored software for vertical markets such as Enterprise Resource Planning and retail markets will follow. The announcement was billed as the first in a series, and NCR promises the second phase of its alliance will be announced later this year. NCR, citing figures from International Data Corp, claims to have cornered 41% of the data warehousing market, and says it has a 33% revenue share of high-end Windows NT servers costing more than $25,000 through sales of its WorldMark servers.
