LAS VEGAS — Companies already analyze your buying habits, your Web surfing patterns, your customer service complaints and just about every other sort of data imaginable.
Now, they're looking for new ways and places to collect information to help their businesses run better.
One of the most promising growth areas for data warehousing giant Teradata Corp. may be in collecting and analyzing data from tiny sensors that can be attached to everything from clothing in a store to crops in a field, company officials said Monday.
"Sensor technology is advancing to the point where the sensors will be the size of a grain of sand, cost less than a jellybean, and ? will have the ability to do lots of data collection," Stephen Brobst, Teradata's chief technology officer, said at the company's annual conference for business partners here.
For a company in the data warehousing business, "this is very exciting stuff," he said.
Some winemakers, for instance, are already experimenting with placing tiny sensors on their vines that can collect real-time data on the effects of weather conditions, how pruning changes grape quality, and other details that can be quickly analyzed by Teradata software, according to the company.
Similarly, radio-frequency identification — or RFID — tags attached to a store's merchandise someday may provide reams of information about what customers like and don't like.
Miamisburg, Ohio-based Teradata also is experimenting with how to collect and analyze other types of "non-traditional" data sources — including e-mails, videos or Web logs that businesses use to connect to customers — to figure out how to make the companies run more efficiently.
Geographic data that about customers' locations and usage patterns is another area Teradata sees as ripe for growth.
On Monday, Teradata released the latest version of its database system that lets users automatically correlate data such as location and distance information with other information like sales trends. For example, it could help cellular phone companies decide where to place towers or help retailers know how far customers are willing to drive to make a purchase.
"This is a significant, significant release," Teradata CEO Mike Koehler said in announcing the release of Teradata 13 at the opening of the company's annual Partners meeting.
The company also is unveiling a new 50-petabyte data warehousing "appliance" computer and new ways to store and retrieve information.
Teradata could use some new tricks in its bag.
One year after the company was spun off from Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp., Teradata is facing a host of new competitors, most notably giants Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which teamed up to get into the data warehousing hardware business last month. HP CEO Mark Hurd, the former CEO of NCR, ran the Teradata business for years.
Other companies, from IBM Corp. to smaller Netezza Corp., also are pushing hard into the business that Teradata pioneered.
Monday, Teradata executives said they weren't worried about the new competition.
"Sometimes people will come up to me and say, aren't you worried about all these people jumping into the data warehouse marketplace?" Brobst said. "Absolutely not — I'd be worried if they weren't coming in. If you're in an industry where people are leaving and not coming in, there's you've got a problem.
"Competition," he said, "is good."
Bob Keefe is a west coast correspondent for