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VERTICA DEAL
Hewlett Packard's deal to acquire Vertica follows a string of recent acquisitions in data warehousing, including SAP's $5.8 billion purchase of Sybase and its Sybase IQ data warehousing product, EMCs purchase of Greenplum, and IBM's $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza. But the HP deal raises plenty of questions about its big-picture strategy, including what it means for HP's partners and what acquisitions could be next for the company.
Vertica, among a dozen or so independent vendors that remain in data warehousing, has a lot to offer HP. Its column-store database delivers high data compression for efficient storage and fast querying in analytic applications. It's also low maintenance, able to get up and running quickly and maintain performance with less tuning than required by conventional relational databases, such as those from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft.
The architecture also supports massively parallel processing on industry-standard hardware, like that offered by HP, so it can scale out to handle data deployments into the hundreds of terabytes. Scalability has helped Vertica score high-end digital marketing and e-commerce customers such as AOL, Twitter, and Groupon.
Vertica has proven itself as an innovator. It added inmemory and flash-memory analysis for faster querying. It introduced Hadoop MapReduce connectivity to support customers interested in so-called NoSQL analysis of nonstandard data, along with options for low-cost open source storage and data processing. Vertica was also among the first vendors to venture into the cloud, with an option to host Vertica deployments on Amazon's EC2 platform. HP says Vertica will bolster its efforts to provide private-cloud services.
Vertica was already partnering with HP, and many of its more than 300 customers run on HP hardware. The database is compatible with HP servers and storage, and it should be a simple matter to configure optimized analytic appliances on HP...