Hewlett-Packard added a key piece to its business intelligence software portfolio Tuesday by completing its acquisition of Vertica Systems, a privately held company based in Billerica, Mass.
The deal, first announced in February, gives HP a real-time analytics platform that can load and analyze data at the same time and handle large volumes of data in physical, virtual and cloud environments.
HP has been using Vertica's technology in its business intelligence appliances since 2007, when it teamed up with Vertica and Red Hat to distribute pre-configured data analysis appliances built on HP BladeSystem c3000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Vertica also powers the new business analytics appliance that HP unveiled earlier this month at HP's Summit 2011 conference in San Francisco. HP plans to offer the new Vertica product as software, as a service, and as a physical appliance. Companies with a heavy transactional focus stand to benefit most from the real time analysis Vertica brings to the table, and in a rental car business, it can factor in a driver's driving record and local weather to figure out risk levels that can then be applied to pricing.
HP CEO Leo Apotheker has made building out HP's software business one of his top priorities. HP isn't revealing what it paid for Vertica, but the deal gives it a solid competitor to data warehouse systems sold by Teradata and data warehouse appliances from Netezza, which IBM acquired in November for $1.7 billion.
Vertica was co-founded in 2005 by Michael Stonebraker, a relational database technology pioneer who previously started Ingres, Illustra, Cohera and StreamBase.
