The data warehousing market just got more interesting. NCR last week said it'll spin off Teradata as a standalone company, a move some analysts think makes Teradata more tempting acquisition bait.

The decision comes only a few months after Hewlett-Packard entered the data warehousing market, in direct competition with Teradata. HP CEO Mark Hurd used to run NCR and Teradata. InformationWeek took an in-depth look at HP's plan in a Jan. 8 cover story.

Teradata will move faster and have a sharper focus on the data warehousing market as an independent company, says Michael Koehler, the senior VP tapped to become president and CEO of the company when it's separated. In the third quarter, Teradata's sales grew 5% from a year ago to $378 million. Its goal is to grow 30% faster than the market, Koehler says, in part by convincing companies to build enterprise data warehouses in lieu of smaller data marts.

It faces an unproven competitor in HP, which has a new data warehousing system called Neoview based on its NonStop database and Integrity servers. HP CIO Randy Mott had been one of Teradata's most high-profile customers before joining HP in 2005, as Wal-Mart's CIO in the 1990s and then as Dell's CIO.

An independent Teradata might be an attractive buyout target for a software company or private equity firm. Koehler declines to address such "speculation."