NCR and Torrent Partner to Enhance Performance and Scalability of Data Warehousing Applications
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NCR Corporation and Torrent Systems announced a partnership under which the two companies plan to deliver high-performance business intelligence applications for data warehouses that enable customers in various industries to solve many critical business problems for the first time. Under the terms of the agreement, Torrent's Orchestrate software will be ported to NCR's powerful Teradata database and WorldMark family of servers by the first quarter of 1999.

Orchestrate hides the complexity of parallel programming, allowing developers to use a visual development environment to more easily create high-performance, parallel versions of previously separated or sequential applications.

The partnership will enable data warehouse users to create and execute large-scale parallel applications that provide significant advances in performance and scalability. Most business intelligence applications are designed to run on only one processor at a time, and suffer sequential bottlenecks that significantly limit their ability to process large amounts of data. With the NCR/Torrent solution, applications will run in parallel, making it possible to analyze vast amounts of data to find answers to highly complex business problems that could not previously be solved.

"With its flagship Teradata database, NCR has long been the leader in scalable data warehousing," said Allen Razdow, president and CEO of Torrent Systems. "This is a natural and powerful partnership that enables our joint customers to build highly scalable applications that are tightly integrated with NCR's Teradata-based data warehouses."

NCR and its customers will use Orchestrate to develop high-performance data warehouse applications targeted to the needs of specific industries, for example:

• Transportation -- Forecasting and optimization analysis to maximize yield or revenue for airlines, railroads, and package delivery service providers;
• Telecommunications -- Leveraging call detail data to micro-segment the consumer base and enable attrition-prevention programs and better targeting of new products and services;
• Financial -- Analyzing detailed data collected from all customer interaction points (ATM, branch, Web, etc.) and other transaction systems to develop individualized channel, product, and risk strategies;
• Retail -- Analyzing transaction-level sales data for advanced market basket analysis and store- and item-level inventory forecasting.

"Through NCR's partnership with Torrent, we are able to leverage the leading environment for creating high-performance, scalable applications for data warehouses," said Dan Harrington, vice president of Data Warehouse Marketing for NCR's Computer Systems Group. "Through the combined power of Orchestrate and Teradata, our joint customers will now be able to build highly scalable applications that were previously too costly and complex. We clearly see this technology as an emerging trend with many of our data warehouse customers."

Established in 1993, Torrent Systems develops Orchestrate, a leading environment for developing and deploying high-performance business intelligence applications. Customers include industry-leaders like Sears, Roebuck and Co., United Airlines, CitiCorp Credit, and Harte Hanks. A privately held company headquartered in Cambridge (MA), Torrent has raised more than $13.5 million in venture and equity capital. Torrent can be reached over the World Wide Web at http://www.torrent.com

NCR Corporation is a recognized world leader in scalable data warehousing, self-service and store automation solutions for the retail, financial and communications industries and other select markets. More information on NCR and its products can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.ncr.com