HP Adding To Data Analysis Offerings With Vertica Acquisition

HP did not disclose how much it is paying for Vertica, a privately held company based in Billerica, Mass. HP said it expected to close the acquisition in its second fiscal quarter ending April 30.

The acquisition of Vertica will enhance HP's capabilities for information optimization, adding sophisticated, real-time business analytics for large and complex sets of data in physical, virtual and cloud environments, the company said in a statement.

“In today’s highly competitive environment, customers need the ability to manage the increasing amounts of data and growing streams of information with more flexible, more dynamic architectures,” said Shane Robison, HP executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer, in a statement. “Vertica’s unique platform combines simplicity with industry-leading performance, allowing HP to leap ahead of the industry in the race to analyze massive amounts of data.”

HP already markets a pre-configured, high-performance data analysis appliance that incorporates the Vertica software. That system, unveiled in 2007, is built on HP BladeSystem c3000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Data analysis systems that incorporate Vertica's software compete with data warehouse systems sold by Teradata and data warehouse appliances from Netezza. IBM acquired Netezza in November for $1.7 billion and the company is currently recruiting channel partners to resell the Netezza product.

Vertica was co-founded in 2005 by Michael Stonebraker, a relational database technology pioneer who previously started Ingres, Illustra, Cohera and StreamBase. At the core of the Vertica technology is a column-based database that's designed for real-time data analysis.