CEO Blog: HP Buys Vertica

First and foremost, I would like to extend my congratulations to both HP and Vertica on the acquisition announced this morning. I have always held Vertica in high regard and am certain they will be a good addition to HP. I think this is a clear indication of the growing importance of analytic databases. It should also reaffirm what I believe is a widely held belief that a columnar database is an ideal choice for analytics.

In the face of "competitors" being acquired, I have seen responses range from thinly veiled attacks to an "amnesty program" for those using the products from the acquired company. I personally find such rhetoric both silly and blatantly transparent. The view that "we are right and smart" and everyone else is "wrong and dumb" is ridiculous. Vertica has good software. By all rights, they have a good company, although the two are not by any means synonymous. Sybase IQ is a good offering, as is Greenplum and ParAccel. The extent to which they are all good companies varies, but there is certainly a great deal of clever software out there, and for that matter, many companies who also know how to sell, support, and operate their companies successfully to the benefit of their customers.

From time to time Infobright has competed with some of these companies. Generally speaking, when we are competing for the same business, one of us probably shouldn't be there. Yes, Infobright is a columnar database. But our focus, approach, and value proposition is quite different. If your business challenge is analyzing machine generated data (like web logs, call detail records, computer logs, device logs, sensor data, online gaming, financial transaction data, etc.) Infobright can provide the high performance you need at much lower cost and with a lot less work than the general-purpose data warehouse products cited above. If your business challenge is more along the lines of a general-purpose data warehouse, then we may cost less, but we'd be the wrong choice. That would be better suited for SAP/Sybase or IBM/Netezza or EMC/Greenplum, or, of course, HP/Vertica.

And in keeping with this, I will not say "if you are a Vertica customer or are looking at Vertica, now you should look at us". Again, that's ridiculous. What I will say, and what I have been saying all along, is that if you are trying to analyze machine generated data, and you want a killer, cost-effective solution, not Sybase, EMC, or even Vertica will give you what we can. Just ask companies like mobile analytics leader Bango, telecom solutions vendor Polystar OSIX, or more than 130 other companies who evaluated their options and chose Infobright for high performance analysis of machine-generated data at lower cost and with less work.

So we remain steadfast in our commitment to deliver an excellent solution for machine generated data analytics while we applaud HP on their latest move.

Congratulations.

Don DeLoach
President & CEO