A deal between Hewlett-Packard, Red Hat and the developer of a new high-performance database system will provide HP channel partners with the opportunity to sell pre-configured data analysis appliances built on HP BladeSystem c3000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the three companies said this week.
The bundled solution, which will compete with data appliances from such vendors as Netezza and DATAllegro, is designed to let customers perform near-real-time and ad-hoc queries on large volumes of data such as financial transactions, customer service information, clickstream data and data generated by radio frequency identification systems.
"We're seeing more demand for cost-effective deployments of business intelligence systems," says Paul Collins, vice president of technology at Total Tec Systems, an HP channel partner based in Edison, N.J., that's reselling the "data mart" appliance. He says customers are looking for alternatives to data analysis appliances built on proprietary hardware and big, expensive products such as Teradata's data warehouse system.
At the heart of the new bundle is a high-performance, "column-oriented" database system from Vertica Systems specifically designed for data analysis applications. Vertica, based in Andover, Mass., was co-founded three years ago by Michael Stonebraker, a relational database technology pioneer who previously started Ingres, Illustra, Cohera and StreamBase. Stonebraker is Vertica's CTO.
The Vertica database was released to the market earlier this year. "We're not an [online transaction processing] database. We're focused on query-intensive database problems," Vertica CEO Ralph Breslauer said in an interview. While many of the company's early sales have been direct, Breslauer expects that 80 percent of Vertica's sales will eventually be made through the channel. "We're aggressively recruiting," he said.
Collins said working with the Vertica technology fits Total Tec Systems' strategy of partnering with leading-edge ISVs. "We find that works well for us because ultimately the ISV is finding the opportunities and driving the business," he said.
