Teradata Corporation is a provider of database-related products and services. The company was formed in 1979 in Brentwood, California, as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech and Citibank's advanced technology group. The company was acquired by NCR Corporation in 1991, and subsequently spun-off again as an independent public company on October 1, 2007.

The company produces a relational database management system of the same name, which it markets as a data warehouse. It also acquired new technologies by making many acquisitions. In 2015, after continued losses, the company announced a business transformation review, which led to divestitures and replacement of executives. Teradata employed 10,093 at the end of 2016, and had corporate headquarters in Dayton, Ohio.

Teradata is an enterprise software company that develops and sells a relational database management system (RDBMS) with the same name. Teradata is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the stock symbol TDC.

The flagship Teradata product is referred to as a "data warehouse system" which stores and manages data. The data warehouses use a "shared nothing architecture", which means that each server node has its own memory and processing power. Adding more servers and nodes increases the amount of data that can be stored. The database software runs on the servers and spreads the workload among them. In 2010, Teradata added text analytics to track unstructured data, such as word processor documents, and semi-structured data, such as spreadsheets.

Teradata has a supplier diversity program that designates a minimum of 3 to 5% of spending on minority, women, veteran, or small business vendors. In 2013, the Ethisphere Institute named Teradata as one of the "World's Most Ethical Companies."

Teradata holds an annual user group conference and expo known as Teradata Partners with keynote industry speakers, educational sessions led by customers and other vendors. The Teradata Partners Conference has been an annual event since 1985. The conference involves lectures and speeches on technical and business topics and announcements about new products.

The concept of Teradata grew from research at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and from the discussions of Citibank's advanced technology group in the 1970s. The company was incorporated in 1979 in Brentwood, California by Jack E. Shemer, Philip M. Neches, Walter E. Muir, Jerold R. Modes, William P. Worth, Carroll Reed and David Hartke. In 1984, Teradata released its DBC/1012 specialized database computer. In 1990, it acquired Sharebase, originally named Britton Lee.

In September 1991, AT&T Corporation acquired NCR Corporation, which in December announced the acquisition of Teradata for about $250 million. Kenneth W. Simonds had been chief executive since 1986. In 1992, Teradata built the first system over 1 terabyte, at Wal-Mart. A Teradata database became the world's largest at 11 terabytes in 1992. By 1997, NCR became independent from AT&T.

In 1999, NCR acquired Strategic Technologies & Systems, and appointed Stephen Brobst as chief technology officer of the Teradata Solutions Group. In April 2000, NCR acquired Ceres Integrated Solutions and its customer relationship management software for $90 million, and in July Stirling Douglas Group and its demand chain management software. In 2005, it acquired financial management software from DecisionPoint.

In January 2007, NCR announced Teradata would become an independent public company, led by Michael F. Koehler. The new company's shares started trading in October. In March 2008 Teradata acquired professional services company Claraview, which previously had spun out software provider Clarabridge.

In August 2010, Teradata acquired column-oriented DBMS vendor Kickfire. In December, it acquired marketing software company Aprimo for about $550 million. In March 2011, it acquired Aster Data Systems for about $263 million. In May 2012, Teradata acquired email direct marketing company eCircle, which was merged into the Aprimo business.

In July 2014, Teradata acquired the assets of Revelytix, a provider of information management products and for a reported $50 million, Hadapt, a company that developed the database management system Presto for Apache Hadoop, and in September, Hadoop service firm Think Big Analytics. In December, Teradata acquired RainStor, a company specializing in online data archiving on Hadoop.

In January 2015, Teradata acquired Appoxxee, a mobile marketing software as a service provider, for about $20 million. In September, Teradata acquired digital marketing company FLXone, based in the Netherlands. In November 2015, after continued losses and declining revenue, a business transformation review was announced. The company terminated "co-president" Herman Wimmer in December 2015, although it later had to pay more than 4.2 million Euros and a company car as severance.

In April 2016, a product line called IntelliFlex was announced. On May 5, 2016 Victor L. Lund, who had been an executive of American Stores from 1977 to 1999, became the chief executive. In July 2016, the marketing applications division, using the Aprimo brand, was sold to private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners for about $90 million. This was hundreds of millions less than Teradata paid making the acquisitions of several companies merged into the unit. Marlin combined businesses of the former eCircle, Appoxee, and Ozone businesses with an email marketing company BlueHornet (that it had acquired in 2015), using the brand Mapp Digital in September 2016.

On July 21, 2016, Teradata acquired Big Data Partnership, a service company based in the UK.

In July 2017, Teradata acquired StackIQ, maker of the Stacki software.

Teradata offers three main services to its customers: cloud and hardware-based data warehousing, business analytics, and consulting services. In September 2016, the company launched Teradata Everywhere, which allows users to submit queries against public and private databases. The service uses massively parallel processing across both its physical data warehouse and cloud storage, including managed environments such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, VMware, and Teradata's Managed Cloud and IntelliFlex. Teradata offers customers both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud storage. In March 2017, Teradata introduced Teradata IntelliCloud, a secure managed cloud for data and analytic software as a service. IntelliCloud is compatible with Teradata's data warehouse platform, IntelliFlex.

Teradata began to market with the term "big data" in 2010. CTO Stephen Brobst attributed the rise of big data to "new media sources, such as social media." The increase in semi-structured and unstructured data gathered from online interactions prompted Teradata to form the "Petabyte club" in 2011 for its heaviest big data users.

The rise of big data resulted in many traditional data warehousing companies updating their products and technology. For Teradata, big data prompted the acquisition of Aster Data Systems in 2011 for the company’s MapReduce capabilities and ability to store and analyze semi-structured data.

Teradata's main competitors are similar products from vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Sybase IQ, as well as Hadoop-based distributions and other open source technologies.

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