"The Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is the best architecture for integrated, cross-functional data to support both strategic and operational intelligence," said Darryl McDonald, chief marketing officer of Teradata. "Enterprise data warehousing drives the highest business value with the lowest overall total cost of ownership. Virtually without exception, every customer we talk to is implementing or has plans to implement an EDW." In addition, many companies today have legacy and analytical applications on multiple hardware platforms and database combinations for various reasons. These systems are used to meet special business unit, departmental, or geographical requirements, as well as to address compliance and privacy concerns. Special-purpose applications such as fraud detection and prevention, customer segmentation, human resources, and forecasting are also sometimes implemented on separate analytical systems. These applications are driving significant investment in business intelligence and analytical systems outside the core EDW, and lead to complex and costly architectures. With Teradata's new competitively priced platforms, customers can now unify their entire analytical architecture by standardizing on the powerful Teradata platforms and database engine. This standardization saves in training, application development time, system management, support and IT infrastructure.

The Teradata 550 SMP is a departmental data warehouse, designed to meet customers' need for a smaller, less expensive system. Over 150 customers have been able to leverage the power of Teradata, but on a smaller scale, up to six terabytes, at an attractive entry price. The Teradata 550 was developed to run a single application or support test and development workloads and can be installed within hours of delivery. It is simple to set up and can use the Novell SUSE Linux 64-bit operating system or Windows.

In addition, customers can license and run the Teradata 12 database on their choice of Intel-based platforms, starting at $40,000(1). Teradata Express Edition, a free developer version of Teradata 12, is available to work on Windows servers and laptops for development, testing and learning. Teradata Express Edition includes the Teradata 12 database, and the full collection of Teradata Tools and Utilities together in a self-installing package.