Gerard Rosak (left) and Ron Swift of Teradata are in a strong position in the data warehousing market Courtesy of Teradata

E Blake Berry: Teradata’s stock has been on a fairly steady upward trend this year despite the state of the US economy. Why is that?

Ron Swift: We don’t want to speculate on the reasons for that, but just look at the nature of what’s going in the financial world. If you looked at Teradata stock, let’s say 14 months ago, you were in the $25-26 range. The natural decline in the IT market, the banking market, the telco market and everything, dropped the values. So in March we were just like anybody else. The stock dropped not because of lack of confidence in us, but in the whole world basically. And in the March period we were sort of riding along with the rest of the market. Since then many companies, both inside and outside of the IT business, have increased in value. Some of them have doubled in value. We have – we’ve more than doubled.

But I think it’s also due to one other factor. We have good earnings, we have stable revenues. We’re not having a decline this year, we’re having an increase. The market is now coming to us because they have realized that they need us and the kinds of things that we do in the area of data warehousing. We’re sort of – to use a tennis term – in the “sweet spot in the racket,” where you perfectly hit the ball. We’re in the sweet spot of IT and business.

We’ve been hearing about IT being the “savior of the market” since 2008. When did companies really start coming to you?

RS: There’s an interesting thing that happened in the first quarter of this year. Most IT firms, including us, thought they’d be down five or 10 percent or maybe even more. We didn’t know. IT budgets were supposed to be reduced or frozen by corporations.

All of a sudden [directors] started coming out in the first or second quarter, saying “If we’re going to reduce costs, we need to integrate, we need to reduce the number of databases, reduce the amount of maintenance and the cost of data. We need to get quality data.” And there was this surge.

One of the things we pride ourselves on is that we don’t get confused in trying to sell everything to everybody, like Microsoft or IBM or Oracle. We focus on data warehousing. That’s our business. And data warehousing is a very interesting business. Some people call it a niche market, but if you talk to every medium-size or large company in this country, they’ll tell you they have a data warehouse. It may not be a very good one, it may not use the best practices, but they’ll say they have one.

Now they’re realizing that many of those data warehouses just involve copies of data put in for reporting mechanisms or doing some statistical analysis, which is the basic primary of our data warehouses. So the surge that came in the first and second quarter of this year is continuing and I think it’s going to be even bigger next year as people get more money. I think what you’re going to see next year is not going to be an evolution or revolution – it’s going to be a firecracker. It’s going to move very quickly.

How big is the data warehousing market here in Poland?

Gerald Rosak: It’s enormous. But for Teradata it’s a little different. We classically focus on the top 20 or so organizations in Poland. That’s our business model, that’s who we do business with. And we partner with a couple of Polish system integrators which have penetration in other sectors of the market where we don’t go directly, and they sometimes bring our technology into these companies.

Sources: NYSE, S&P 500

What industries are you pursuing other than banks and telcos?

GR: One area – which I think isn’t that competitive if you consider today’s environment – is the energy sector. [You have to ask questions like] are they treating their millions of customers as clients yet? Is this a market where the customer is visible? Is there retention? If this sector becomes more competitive, it would be quite interesting.

The government has a strong hand in the Polish energy sector, though. How much of a barrier is that to introducing best practices and modern solutions?

GR: I think that’s a good question, one that was asked back when we were entering the telco sector. The big telcos were still connected somehow to the state. There was also the question of whether these organizations would even understand that they had customers, and not just subscribers.

Nevertheless, even these organizations understood at the time that there was a change coming and they needed to prepare. I believe there will be a similar process here as well.