Vertica update – HP appliance deal, customer information, and more
Vertica quietly announced an appliance bundling deal with HP and Red Hat today. That got me quickly onto the phone with Vertica’s Andy Ellicott, to discuss a few different subjects. Most interesting was the part about Vertica’s customer base, highlights of which included:
- Vertica’s claim to have “50” customers includes a bunch of unpaid licenses, many of them in academia.
- Vertica has about 15 paying customers.
- Based on conversations with mutual prospects, Vertica believes that’s more customers than DATAllegro has. (Of course, each DATAllegro sale is bigger than one of Vertica’s. Even so, I hope Vertica is wrong in its estimate, since DATAllegro told me its customer count was “double digit” quite a while ago.)
- Most Vertica customers manage over 1 terabyte of user data. A couple have bought licenses showing they intend to manage 20 terabytes or so.
- Vertica’s biggest customer/application category – existing customers and sales pipelines alike – is call detail records for telecommunications companies. (Other data warehouse specialists also have activity in the CDR area.). Major applications are billing assurance (getting the inter-carrier charges right) and marketing analysis. Call center uses are still in the future.
- Vertica’s other big market to date is investment research/tick history. Surely not coincidentally, this is a big area of focus for Mike Stonebraker, evidently at both companies for which he’s CTO. (The other, of course, is StreamBase.)
- Runners-up in market activity are clickstream analysis and general consumer analytics. These seem to be present in Vertica’s pipeline more than in the actual customer base.
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Business Objects, Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, DATAllegro, HP and Neoview, RDF and graphs, Vertica Systems | 5 Comments |
Clarifying SAS-in-the-DBMS, and other SAS tidbits
I followed up with Keith Collins of SAS today about SAS-in-the-database, expanding on what I learned or thought I did when we talked last month. Here’s the scoop:
SAS users do a lot of data filtering, aka data preparation, in SAS. These have WHERE clauses, just like SQL. However, only some of them map to actual SQL WHERE clauses. SAS is now implementing many of the rest as UDFs (User-Defined Functions), one DBMS at a time, starting with Teradata. In addition, SAS users can write custom filters that get registered as UDFs. This capability will be released with SAS 9.2. (The timing on SAS 9.2 is in line with the comment thread to my prior post on SAS-in-the-DBMS.) Read more