NCR buys into object software

NCR is tipped to buy an object oriented software company to help it achieve its goals of selling applications and dominating the data warehousing market.

Sources said NCR could be bidding to buy in Europe to find the technology it needs, but the company refused to comment.

It did state that it wants to sell applications to supplement its strong data warehousing business. Market research group IDC said the vendor owns over 50 per cent of this market by revenue.

Chairman and chief executive Lars Nyberg said: "We cannot do it on our own but we need something to run with our hardware and data warehouse.

We want to become much more of a software company, adding value. We plan to have most of our R&D budget focused on software development by the year 2000."

Following a keynote address to NCR's staff, customers and partners, Nyberg said NCR has also decided to make strategic decisions centrally rather than in each territory and rejected the notion of the universal database.

"The majority of our effort in our computer systems business will be focused on data warehousing," Nyberg said. "One database that is everything to everybody simply does not exist and users will benefit from working with multiple database products."

Nyberg reaffirmed NCR's commitment to Teradata, its high-end database, which will be ported to other platforms, starting with Microsoft NT in mid-1998.

Next month, NCR will announce its first results since January, when it was spun off from former parent AT&T. Analysts expect poor figures but the company hopes its newly launched Worldmark 4700 and 5150 servers will help boost sales, which are not growing in the midrange sector, Nyberg admitted.

But he said he is far happier with NCR now it is a separate entity from AT&T, although he was told about the spin-off only five weeks after taking the helm at NCR - or AT&T GIS as it was then called. "There is greater scrutiny now and the board is tougher, but it is very good," he claimed.

Many attendees said NCR's decision to add Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system to its NT-based business improves the company's strategy.