Teradata keeps warehousing money

Shrugs off economy and rivals

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Enterprise, 7th August 2008 18:48 GMT

Free whitepaper – Straight Talk with Dell: Sending out an SaaS

Teradata appears to be surviving a global economic slowdown that's affecting some of its largest customers.

The data warehouse maker this week reported second quarter revenue of $455m - a 6 per cent rise over the same period last year. (Although, that increase does include five percentage points worth of benefit from currency translation.) And Teradata's net income came in at $69m, which marks a healthy gain from $49m in 2007's second quarter. Gross margin for the period was 54.7 per cent versus 53.5 per cent.

Teradata has been under a tremendous amount of pressure since departing the cozy confines of former parent NCR last year. For one, the big boys, including IBM, Oracle, HP and Microsoft (which just bought DatAllegro), want to eat away at Teradata's lucrative data warehouse business, and a ton of start-ups would like to do the same. Secondly, those big retailers, financial services types and mega corporations that make up Teradata's customer base have been hit by a sluggish economy, which should crimp interest in huge data warehouse systems.

But it would seem that enough people need top-of-the-line data crunching boxes to keep Teradata going well even during tight times.

Shares of Teradata bumped up close to 7 per cent during Thursday's trading to $24.49. ®

Free whitepaper – What Exchange can't do - and Dell can