NCR UNVEILS TERAMINER DATA MINING PROGRAM; ANNOUNCES TERAMINER STATS DATA MINING SOFTWARE
To help businesses more quickly and accurately harvest the growing volumes of data from daily transactions to better understand and serve their customers, NCR Corporation has unveiled its TeraMiner Stats data mining software. TeraMiner Stats is part of an NCR-developed suite of software designed to significantly improve data mining processes for Teradata Warehouse customers.
TeraMiner Stats overcomes the limitations of most data mining tools, that were not designed to handle the large and growing data volumes now common to most companies. According to industry analysts at International Data Corporation, the amount of data in the average data warehouse will quadruple over a three-year period. Rather than using a sample of data to perform the data mining analysis, TeraMiner Stats can perform statistical analysis and transformations on any or all data in the warehouse -- even if it's multiple terabytes.
With TeraMiner, NCR has moved core data mining capabilities into its Teradata database. This increased functionality in Teradata gives organizations that want to mine growing volumes of data the necessary flexibility to do so in a high-performance environment. TeraMiner Stats includes scalable pre-processing components that address critical areas of data mining, including data description, derivation, reduction, reorganization and sampling/partitioning.
By leveraging the inherent parallelism and processing power of the Teradata engine, TeraMiner Stats enables customers to use all their detail level data in performing complex data mining analyses, such as customer segmentation, propensity to buy, sales forecasting, attrition and retention.
The result is that Teradata Warehouse customers can increase their return on investment (ROI) by developing more accurate predictive models in less time. This allows customers to execute more frequent and highly tuned campaigns.
According to Forrester Research, major database players are moving data mining functionality into their database engines, enabling business-centered data mining. Forrester believes it is critical for data mining technology to move from its experts-only orientation to being an accessible, integrated technology that can be used across the enterprise.
"TeraMiner Stats streamlines data preparation and descriptive analysis -- which typically consumes between 60 and 80 percent of a company's data mining efforts and resources before they even analyze their data," said Vickie Farrell, assistant vice president of Teradata marketing for NCR Corporation. "This approach makes mining large volumes of data feasible. With TeraMiner, NCR has already delivered what other vendors are only talking about."
TeraMiner leverages Teradata's ability to handle a large number of multiple concurrent users and provides a single repository of analytic data sets, as opposed to redundant data sets across the enterprise. This enables businesses to streamline their data mining process by minimizing the number of steps required to analyze and manage that data.
Additional TeraMiner products will be released in 2000 and provide statistical and machine-learning algorithms, as well as model deployment, monitoring and lifecycle maintenance.
Often called knowledge discovery, data mining is the process of analyzing detail data to recognize patterns and extract and present actionable information to solve business problems. A valuable component of data warehousing, the data mining process allows customers to increase their return on investment on information in their data warehouses and gain valuable insight to initiate competitive actions.
TeraMiner, designed by an elite team of developers at the company's Rancho Bernardo, CA facility, was developed and field-tested in NCR's Data Mining Lab. As a result of their leading-edge work, NCR currently has 10 'patents pending' related to data mining.
The Data Mining Lab -- with locations in Rancho Bernardo and Chertsey, England -- is a low-risk consulting engagement that allows data warehouse users and business analysts at companies of all sizes to unleash the potential of data mining.
To date, companies in the communications, financial, transportation, insurance and retail industries have already taken advantage of the Data Mining Lab facilities. The Lab also provides 'mentoring' to help customers learn to use data mining as a powerful business tool in a highly secure environment, while gaining the required experience in a controlled lab facility.
Data Mining Lab engagements, which have used TeraMiner Stats for the past year, have helped marketing professionals from NCR customers achieve higher return on their marketing investment by focusing campaigns on customers most likely to respond. Finance departments have benefited by understanding how to better align cost-to-serve with the revenue -- or the potential revenue -- of a particular customer segment.
One of the customers already taking advantage of NCR's approach to data mining is Telefonica de Argentina (TdeA), one of two telecommunications providers in that country. TdeA provides local, long distance and international services for the southern region of the country, as well as cellular, Internet, and other unregulated services.
To prepare for a competitive marketplace when deregulation takes place in Argentina at the end of 1999, TdeA decided to investigate how data mining analysis could help the company develop plans and products that would make them more prepared to face deregulation. In addition, TdeA wanted to maintain its leadership position in the southern region of Argentina and build strong customer relationships. To accomplish these goals, TdeA turned to NCR's Data Mining Lab and TeraMiner Stats to explore their data, and apply mining techniques that addressed a variety of areas including customer retention, loyalty/rewards, product affinity, and product/price packaging.
Shipping now, TeraMiner Stats runs on the Windows NT operating system and is priced from $5,000 to $40,000, depending on the number of nodes in the NCR Teradata Warehouse.
Helping businesses gain new insights, NCR's Teradata is the only database with the power and performance to answer any question, on any data, at any time.
Teradata provides industry-leading performance, unlimited scalability from 10 gigabytes to more than 100 terabytes, seamless connectivity and the lowest administration requirements of any database on the market. It employs a patented shared-nothing MPP (massively parallel processing) architecture that can be deployed on both SMP (symmetric multi-processing) and MPP hardware platforms. Teradata runs on UNIX and Windows NT. Teradata is also being enhanced to support complex data types and user-defined objects.
NCR Corporation is in the business of transforming transactions into relationships. NCR is a recognized world leader in data warehousing solutions, ATMs, point-of-sale, high performance scanners, and support services for retail, financial and national accounts markets. NCR's business solutions are built on the foundation of the company's long-established industry knowledge and consulting expertise, value-adding software, global consumer support services, a complete line of consumable and media products, and world-leading hardware technology. More information about NCR and its products may be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.ncr.com.