June 20, 2011

Columnar DBMS vendor customer metrics

Last April, I asked some columnar DBMS vendors to share customer metrics. They answered, but it took until now to iron out a couple of details. Overall, the answers are pretty impressive. 

Sybase said that Sybase IQ had > 2000 direct customers and >500 indirect customers (i.e., end customers of OEMs). That’s counting by customers; I know from prior discussions that Sybase IQ is running at close to two installations per customer. I also believe that Sybase counts different divisions of the same large enterprise as separate customers.

Vertica cited a figure of 500 customers as of April (end Q1?), which is close to 600 now, about 40% or a little more direct. The difference between this and a 2010 year-end figure of 328 is not only new sales, but also slow reporting by OEMs.  One cool figure — a single OEM reported 82 end sales in a single (quarterly?) report. And a number of those direct customers are substantial; Vertica’s customer logo page features lots of telcos, lots of internet companies, and the national operation of Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Pay no attention to small inconsistencies in the number of Vertica direct customers (250 at year-end, no more than that now); Colin Mahony just estimates these numbers for me from memory, and minor inaccuracies are quite excusable.

Even cooler — Vertica reports 7 customers with a petabyte or more of user data each. About 5 of the 7 are obvious-suspect big-name firms; but unsurprisingly, those big names are NDA. I did secure permission to say that there are 2 telecom companies, a mobile gaming vendor, another internet company, and 3 financial services outfits of various kinds.

SAND Technology reported >600 total customers, including >100 direct. Since SAND has been around since the 1990s, those aren’t great average annual figures, but they’re probably more than many people (including me) thought.

Infobright reported around 200 total paying customers, 130 direct. There are surely a lot more users of open source Infobright, but precise numbers are of course hard to come by.

If I asked ParAccel in the April go-round, I’ve misplaced their answer, but back in October the figure was >30 customers, 2 of them over 100 terabytes. I’ve seen published figures of 40+ for ParAccel since.

Comments

5 Responses to “Columnar DBMS vendor customer metrics”

  1. David Menninger on June 20th, 2011 10:42 am

    FWIW, I spoke to the ParAccel representatives at Information Builders Summit last week and they confirmed the figures above re customer count.

  2. Greg Rahn on June 20th, 2011 10:44 am

    Curt-

    – What is the definition of “customer” here?
    – With Vertica’s seven 1PB customers claim, are each (or any) of those a single cluster supporting 1PB or a simply a number of Vertica clusters totaling 1PB?

    Thanks for clarifying.

  3. Curt Monash on June 22nd, 2011 4:10 pm

    Greg,

    1 PB or more in a single cluster at each of 7 genuine customers, irrespective of whether there also are separate clusters at those customers holding yet more data.

    I think it’s no more than 1 petabyte-class Vertica cluster per customer at this time.

  4. Big Data and SAP HANA? Or Sybase IQ? | Vital BI on December 11th, 2011 2:24 pm

    […] few TeraBytes, while Big Data currently is something in single digit PetaBytes. E.g. HP Vertica has 7 customers with a petabyte or more of user data each accordingly to Monash […]

  5. ParAccel update | DBMS 2 : DataBase Management System Services on December 9th, 2012 11:58 am

    […] ParAccel now has 60+ customers, up from 30+ two years ago and 40ish soon thereafter. […]

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