Teradata represents new face of growth in Dayton region

Two years ago, the city of Dayton took a gut punch when corporate giant NCR left the city to relocate to Atlanta. Luckily, NCR left behind a legacy of its success in the form of spin-off Teradata, the world's leading data warehousing and analytics firm. With a global customer base and nearly $2 billion in annual sales, Teradata is a spark of hope for growth and opportunity that the Dayton region is counting on.

While only about 400 of Teradata's nearly 8,000 employees are located in Dayton, the company's presence in the city is felt on much larger scale. Its record of innovation and high profile status in the data warehousing marketplace means that Dayton benefits from the fallout of these successes as other high-tech firms take notice and want to be located nearby, in the center of Teradata's universe.

Jeff Hoagland, president and CEO of the Dayton Development Coalition, says that the presence of Teradata in Dayton is like a vote of confidence for the city and a magnet for other high tech companies.

"Teradata recently moved into a new location south of the Dayton Mall (Austin Road interchange)," says Hoagland. "They were one of the first tenants. Now, several other high-tech companies are moving in or are considering moving in. Teradata took the chance, and now we're seeing more follow."

Teradata provides data warehousing and analytics services to more than 1,200 customers around the world. These include well known names such as American Airlines, Apple Computer, AT&T Wireless, Caterpillar, Walmart and many more.

"Most of our customers are in the Fortune 50 category," says Bruce Langos, chief operating officer. "We have 100 percent of the top global telecom business, 100 percent of the top global airline business, 70 percent of the top retailers, and 80 percent of the top savings banks."

Teradata provides its customers with technology to capture and analyze the millions of pieces of information that each client company handles every day about customer activity, operational activity, logistics and more. Their clients use the data to make key decisions about business strategy.

Teradata's products have been among the most innovative in its field. The company has been showered with accolades from industry experts including being named as one of the "Intelligent Enterprise Dozen," a list of service providers that matter most to intelligent corporations, at least seven times. It has been named by BusinessWeek magazine as one of the world's "InfoTech 100," the top performing tech companies, and it was honored as "one of the world's most ethical companies" this year by the Ethisphere Institute for its ethical business standards. Teradata was one of only four software companies chosen for the award.

Like many other high tech success stories, Teradata's started out simply. It was founded by students at the California Institute of Technology in a garage in Brentwood, California in 1979. At the time it was a revolutionary database management system for parallel processing with multiple microprocessors. The name Teradata symbolized the management of trillions of bytes (terabytes) of data.

In 1989 Teradata partnered with NCR to build the next generation of database computers. As part of the agreement, NCR owned a portion of Teradata.

AT&T acquired NCR in 1991 and Teradata became part of NCR the same year. Just six years later, in 1997, AT&T spun off NCR and made it independent once again.

In 2007, Teradata was made an independent spin-off of NCR and began publicly trading on the New York Stock Exchange as TDC.

In addition to Dayton, Teradata has offices in San Diego, Atlanta and regional offices throughout much of the world.

So far this year, Teradata has been in an aggressive growth trend, acquiring two new technology companies: Aprimo, a global leader in cloud-based integrated marketing software, and Aster Data Systems, Inc., a market leader and pioneer in advanced analytics and the management of a variety of unstructured and semi-structured data.

Hiring has been active in Dayton after Langos announced earlier this year that the company was looking to add 40 to 45 new employees in its information technology group.

"Our growth has been consistent over the past several years," says Langos. "We are broadening into new markets such as health care, insurance, utilities, government and media and entertainment."

Hoagland says Teradata "is one of the strongest private entities in the city," and represents a tremendous opportunity for high tech job growth.

"They have a lot of smart minds at Teradata and they hire a lot of smart people," he says. "Dayton has a skilled workforce that is a huge asset to a company like Teradata. We are offering more training programs that will get our workforce up to speed for the type of jobs that Teradata offers."

Langos adds, "One thing's obvious, having innovation in the area has fueled interest from other businesses that are attracted to Ohio. We're not in the rust belt anymore. This is a region with high tech businesses."