February 14, 2011
Some quick notes on HP-Vertica
HP is acquiring Vertica.
- Now we know (at least in part) why Vertica went oddly silent for a while.
- As per that same link, Vertica has >250 ordinary customers, and >70 more OEM sell-through ones.
- This is a setback for speculation about any kind of upcoming Aster/HP tie-up.
- Edit: Forgot this one briefly — HP chairman Ray Lane was previously involved with Vertica.
- Vertica arguably is the most mature of the modern column-store DBMS — i.e., the ones that don’t have their roots in bitmaps the way Sybase and SAND do.
- HP executed really badly in data warehouse DBMS and appliances under former CEO Mark Hurd.
- Unfortunately, if you’re quickly researching Vertica, neither Gartner nor Forrester is a reliable source of detailed information.
- It would make sense for HP to acquire StreamBase too, and fold StreamBase into Vertica. Reasons include:
- StreamBase and Vertica are aligned with each other. Both were founded by Mike Stonebraker, with overlapping groups of academic contributors. Both are in the Boston area. StreamBase and Vertica have worked together on various joint customer accounts, especially in the financial services sector.
- Like other independent CEP vendors, StreamBase can’t or won’t accomplish much outside certain niches (mainly financial services).
- StreamBase reports, rather credibly, that it’s doing well in its niches. While StreamBase’s success seems to include a heavy dose of professional services, that hardly would be a deal-breaker for HP.
- It would make partial sense for HP to acquire VoltDB, and fold VoltDB into Vertica.
- VoltDB was actually spun out of Vertica, and incubated in Vertica offices. A lot of thinking has already been done about how to integrate VoltDB and Vertica.
- VoltDB needs the help, as its strategy is not attuned to the needs of succeeding in a highly competitive, rapidly innovative marketplace.
- VoltDB doesn’t have the kind of traction on which a big company like HP could hang an acquisition case or acquisition strategy.
Categories: In-memory DBMS, Investment research and trading, Memory-centric data management, StreamBase, Streaming and complex event processing (CEP), VoltDB and H-Store
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13 Responses to “Some quick notes on HP-Vertica”
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Interesting analysis. Such activity could certainly catapult HP forward in its [assumed] software strategy. The synergies across the companies would certainly mitigate a portion of the integration risk. But you assume HP are “attuned to the needs of succeeding in a highly competitive, rapidly innovative marketplace”. How is their track record in this regard? Especially when it comes to software…
Conor,
I make no such assumption.
You are correct. I was putting works in your mouth 🙂 Apologies.
With those three acquisitions, they’ll have all of 50 or so million in revenue in the data management space?
It is hard for me to see HP competing with IBM, Oracle or Microsoft in this area without a purchase of SAP/Sybase and/or Teradata. The technology acquisitions are fine, but they need to buy a customer base (in data management) as well.
Vertica may help them against EMC/Greenplum.
This acquisition makes sense from a strategic point of view for HP, but they should now seamlessly integrate Vertica’s technology with its other product offerings in this domain to make it all work for the end customer.
I believe that there is still a lot of merit in HP also buying out Aster, in addition to this acquisition.
Vertica has had some success in OEMing to network-monitoring kinds of vendors, but otherwise what kind of integration do you have in mind?
[…] compra Vertica. Buenas notas. Hacía días que el mercado estaba parado y parece que se vuelve a reactivar. Interesante […]
Does the ax fall on Neoview?
Interesting. If HP keeps aligning with MS, it could offer fast track SQL Server appliances for general rdbms, and scale out Vertica ones as an alternative to PDW (and if PDW matures – still offer Vertica as the intermediate size mart offering to PDWs EDW, and Vertica as the spoke to PDW hubs as well).
The Streambase synergy comment makes no sense to me unless they are willing to invest in integration where CEP turns mostly into an ETL tool.
The most likely outcome to me is that HP blows integration of Vertica (and IBM only sells Netezzas to F100 companies) creating big opportunities and risk for the other vendors – who likely will need to make it on their own. The next most likely option is one more of the column dbmses is bought by (IBM/Oracle/Teradata)
The ax has already fallen on Neoview. Neoview has shuffled off the mortal coil. Neoview is pushing up daisies. Neoview is an ex-product.
What does the Big Data ecosystem look like today, and how will it change over the next decade?…
For sellers: Hadoop platform is leading the way including main MapReduce and HBase and HDFS components (batch crunching, lookups, storage): Cloudera, Datameer, Infosphere. Then all the appliances/analytics DBMS folks goes: Aster, ParAccel, Greenplum (E…
[…] Some quick notes on #HP #Vertica # It would make sense for HP to acquire StreamBase too, and fold StreamBase into Vertica. Reasons include: […]
[…] HP bought Vertica. […]