NCR More Than Doubles Data Warehouse For World's Leading Retailer To Over 100 Terabytes
NCR Corporation has announced that Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the global leader in retailing, has more than doubled the size of its data warehouse, which is built on the foundation of NCR's Teradata Warehouse.
At a meeting with more than 4,000 representatives of the company's merchandise suppliers, Wal-Mart said its system, which has more than twice the capacity of the next largest Fortune 500 data warehouse, has grown from 44 terabytes to 101 terabytes over the past year. A terabyte of information is the equivalent of 250 million pages of text. NCR is the only company with more than 100 data warehouses of one terabyte or greater on a single platform - Teradata.
Wal-Mart and its suppliers met in Dallas for Wal-Mart's annual Retail Link Users Conference, which began Sunday.
"Our NCR Teradata-based data warehouse enables us to better serve consumers with each transaction in each store, helping Wal-Mart build stronger relationships with every shopper," said Randy Mott, Wal-Mart senior vice president and CIO. "A major focus with this upgrade has been to improve collaboration with our suppliers, which enables us to merchandise each store on an individual basis and provide superior local shopper satisfaction. We do this through Retail Link, which gives suppliers access via the Internet to sales, inventory and shipping information about their products sold at Wal-Mart stores and SAM'S Clubs."
Powered by NCR's Teradata and NCR WorldMark 5150 and 5200 servers, the Wal-Mart data warehouse runs more than 30 business applications, supports more than 18,000 users and handles some 120,000 complex queries a week. As Wal-Mart captures shoppers' transactions, the data warehouse receives 8.4 million updates every minute during peak times - detailed data on each item purchased.
More than 7,000 suppliers access the data warehouse via Wal-Mart's web-based Retail Link, enabling suppliers to know exactly what is selling where, plan their production accordingly, and keep inventories under control. With sales and in-stock information transmitted between Wal-Mart and their supplier-partners over the Internet, buyers and suppliers have a single source of information - saving a significant amount of time and energy over more traditional systems.
"Teradata is the only database we have found that scales to the size required to support our growing base of Wal-Mart buyers and suppliers, while providing the level of performance that we need," Mott added.
NCR, a global leader in retail data warehousing, has been Wal-Mart's data warehouse partner since the installation of a 300 gigabyte Teradata Warehouse in 1990. In addition to its Teradata and WorldMark technology, NCR provides professional services support to Wal-Mart, including performance tuning. NCR also provides Wal-Mart with in-store processors, scanners, and other store automation solutions.
"Wal-Mart has many choices of technology solution suppliers," said Tony Fano, senior vice president of NCR's Retail Solutions Group. "Their continued partnership with NCR reflects our expertise in building very large data warehouses to support complex information and decision support systems. It also reflects our commitment to maintain a close partnering relationship with our customers in the retail industry."
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (WMT) operates more than 2,400 stores and 450 SAM'S Clubs in the United States. Internationally, the company operates more than 725 units. Wal-Mart employs more than 815,000 associates in the United States and 135,000 internationally. In 1998, the company raised and donated more than $127 million for charitable organizations. Wal-Mart is located on the Internet at http://www.wal-mart.com.
NCR Corporation is in the business of transforming transactions into relationships. NCR is a recognized world leader in data warehousing solutions, ATMs, point-of-service, high performance scanners, and support services for retail, financial, communications, airline and insurance 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 customer support services, a complete line of consumable and media products, and world-leading hardware technology. More information about NCR and its solutions may be found on the Internet at http://www.ncr.com.