Another TDWI conference approaches. Not coincidentally, I had another Vertica briefing. Primary subjects included some embargoed stuff, plus (at my instigation) outsourced data marts. But I also had the opportunity to follow up on a couple of points from February’s briefing, namely:

Vertica has about 35 paying customers. That doesn’t sound like a lot more than they had a quarter ago, but first quarters can be slow.

Vertica’s list price is $150K/terabyte of user data. That sounds very high versus the competition. On the other hand, if you do the math versus what they told me a few months ago — average initial selling price $250K or less, multi-terabyte sites — it’s obvious that discounting is rampant, so I wouldn’t actually assume that Vertica is a high-priced alternative.

Vertica does stress several reasons for thinking its TCO is competitive. First, with all that compression and performance, they think their hardware costs are very modest. Second, with the self-tuning, they think their DBA costs are modest too. Finally, they charge only for deployed data; the software that stores copies of data for development and test is free.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 1:39 am and is filed under Analytics and analytic technologies, Columnar architectures, Data warehousing, Database compression, Vertica Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.