NCR Corp has decided it’s time it got serious about data mining, and has given Basingstoke, UK-based firm Integral Solutions Ltd an important fillip by incorporating its Clementine toolset as the basis of a Knowledge Discovery Workbench that will be sold to its data warehouse customers. NCR is to begin offering a raft of packaged data mining/warehousing services, though it is a puzzle why the company has taken so long to gets its act together or why it hasn’t leveraged its Teradata database expertise to create its own line of strategic offerings in the area. It spent nine months just putting the names down on paper. At the high-end, components include WorldMark 5100 MPP server, Teradata data warehouse for Unix, NCR’s own management discovery tool services plus third party data mining tools from SAS Institute; San Francisco, California-based HyperParallel Inc; Austin, Texas-based Knowledge Discovery One; Edinburgh, Scotlandbased Quadstone Ltd and Fort Worth, Texas-based Sabre Division Technologies. Costs go from $500,000 to $2m. At the data mart level NCR is offering WorldMark 4300 servers and the Integral Solutions-based Knowledge Discovery Workbench running on Microsoft SQL Server on NT. Available in July, prices will range from $150,000 to $450,000. For customers with existing data warehouses, NCR offers a selection of data mining tools including the Integral Solutions software and Angoss International Ltd’s KnowledgeSeeker. Prices start at $10,000-up. NCR estimates less than 10% of its 550-odd existing data warehouse customers currently employ data mining techniques.
