Companies that need large-scale data warehouse technology have a new option. The IT services arm of oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell Group is spinning off its data warehousing operation into an independent company. The new entity, Kalido Ltd., will sell and support Shell's Kalido data warehouse technology that Shell has been developing since 1996 at a cost of $20 million.

"I think this is an important step in bringing data warehousing to big businesses' data infrastructures," says Aberdeen Group analyst Bob Moran. "This is an exceptionally high-end, industrial-strength approach." Along those lines, the London-based Kalido also said that food product and consumer packaged-goods giant Unilever plc. is its first customer outside of Shell. Unilever is assembling a Kalido-based data warehouse to consolidate information about the company's customers, product portfolio, and procurement processes.

Shell has installed the Kalido technology at more than 100 Shell sites around the world. The system is based on a federated architecture that dynamically links distributed data warehouses so they function as a single entity, a key advantage for global corporations with distributed data systems. The system also uses advanced metadata technology so information with inconsistent data structures, such as different file formats, languages, and currencies, can be combined for analysis, according to the company.

The Kalido system is also said to be highly scalable. The Shell Oil operation of the Shell Group is using Kalido to link 63 data stores around the globe, says Andy Hayler, CEO of the spin-off. The system runs on Oracle databases, but Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 versions are also in the works. Pricing for single-server versions of Kalido is set at $300,000.