Mark Hurd is going back into the data warehouse business that he used to be in when he was at NCR, the Teradata business that catapulted him to the top of NCR and from his success there to HP.

Maybe it’ll be a good luck charm for HP too. It’s a strategic move and HP needs the revenue growth to meet its projected numbers and remain the world’s biggest computer company.

HP has built itself what is supposed to be a next-generation data warehouse platform called Neoview, made out of its servers, storage and data mining software that it’s been quietly pushing for months now but only formally announced the other day, casting it as a “business outcomes engine.

It’s using its x86 and Itanium servers, StorageWorks storage server and Tandem’s old Non-Stop SQL database that HP acquired when it bought Compaq that’s been optimized for data warehousing. It’s also throwing in its more recent Knightsbridge Solutions acquisition with its BI software and a bunch of dedicated services.

It’s promising to create real-time business information out of disparate, otherwise silo’d data. It’s supposed to handle a high number of complex queries at the same time. And it’s talking about making sense of product sales, customer trends or production and operational effectiveness.

The Global 2000-bound widgetry will start at $645,000 for a 16-processor Itanium configuration with 4TB of disk space and soar into the multimillions from there as it moves into the hundreds of terabytes and up to 128 servers.

Unlike the competition, HP says, and goodness knows Hurd ought to know, Neoview is designed for a 24x7 environment. The competition of course is Teradata and IBM and there are open source purveyors out there too like GreenPlum.

HP is eating its own dog food and installing Neoview internally. Outside it’ll be chasing retail (like Teradata’s prized Wal-Mart account?), banking, insurance, healthcare, the life sciences, energy companies and communications. It’s had Neoview out with a handful of sites like Bon-Ton Stores since last year.

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