Vertica Has Banner Year With Its Record-Breaking Database

BILLERICA, Mass., Jan. 21 -- The economic paralysis that has gripped the IT industry is lost on Vertica Systems, as the company had a breakout year in 2008 with triple-digit revenue growth, a huge spike in new customers, and a clutch of industry awards, to name just a few of many achievements. Customers realize they need to "do more with less" and the Vertica(R) Analytic Database allows them to do so with regards to enterprise analytics.

Most significant was the wave of companies that embraced the Vertica Analytic Database last year to handle their heavy business intelligence workloads. More than 60 organizations - including heavyweights like Comcast, Verizon, JP Morgan Chase, Vonage, Pink OTC Markets, Inc., Level 3 and Mozilla - are now on the company's customer roster. Many were repeat customers, and a rising percentage of that growth came from customers outside the U.S., such as Europe's BlueCrest Capital Management and Australia-based nMetrics.

The net result was a 500% growth in sales for Vertica in 2008. To accommodate the surge and prepare for continued growth, the company doubled its employees and moved into larger headquarters. It also added a new sales and support office in the UK to handle the EMEA region, as well as a new QA facility in India to ensure high product quality.

New products and accolades

On the product front, Vertica launched version 2.0 of the Vertica Analytic Database in February. Version 2.0 is the first production-proven columnar database with an MPP architecture able to quickly handle many concurrent complex queries on massive amounts of data while running on "green" grids of low-cost industry-standard hardware. It soon followed up this announcement with Vertica Analytic Database for the Cloud, the world's first on-demand analytic database hosted on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Continuing its pace of rapid innovation, the company ended the year announcing Vertica 2.5, a new version of its database designed to simplify tera-mart deployments that work in conjunction with existing data warehouses.

These technology innovations helped Vertica win a slew of industry accolades, including the Red Herring 100 Award honoring the top private U.S. companies, InfoWorld's Top 10 Tech Startups, Intelligent Enterprise's Editor's Choice Award as a company to watch in the IT industry, and finalist's contention for the TechWeb Jolt Awards, considered the "Oscars" of the software development industry.

Vertica also appeared in Gartner's annual Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems report in 2008. In Vertica's January 6th news release announcing the honor, Gartner Vice President and Analyst Donald Feinberg said: "Column-store DBMSs (Database Management Systems) should be considered as primary candidates for analytic data marts due to I/O performance gained from compression and retrieval of fewer columns (typical of analytic applications)... In the two specific areas where column-store DBMS excel (analytics and archiving solutions), there can be a large cost savings and, with analytic applications, a large performance gain."

New partners

Many companies joined the growing list of independent software vendors that have deployed Vertica-based solutions to dozens of Fortune 2000 companies in industries such as financial services, telecom, tech, transportation and healthcare. Sonian Inc, a digital content archiving solution provider, tapped Vertica's cloud-based offering to help its customers store and search hundreds of terabytes of data to find e-mails, instant messages and other electronic data. nMetrics embedded Vertica within its network performance monitoring appliances, which have been deployed to several large banks, telecom and airline companies within Australia. And market intelligence firm Diio partnered with Vertica to help airlines make wiser network planning decisions and potentially greater profits.

In 2008, Vertica also announced product integrations with and/or conducted highly attended webinars with HP, IBM, EMC, Amazon, MicroStrategy, LogiXML, JasperSoft, Pentaho, Syncsort, Tableau and Talend, showcasing for customers how they can analyze more data in more ways, faster, so they can out-innovate the competition.

Record setting performance

In December, Vertica capped the year by teaming with HP and Syncsort, a data integration partner, to set a new world record for loading data into a relational database for business intelligence applications. The new world record shatters the previous database extraction, transformation and load (ETL) performance benchmark by cleansing and loading 5.4 TB of raw data into the Vertica Analytic Database in less than one hour, using highly cost-efficient HP BladeSystem c-Class servers running the RedHat Linux operating system.

"We had a great year because we're passionate about delivering high value and performance to customers. Our growth proves that," said Ralph Breslauer, Vertica's CEO. "Vertica is poised for even greater growth in 2009 because we provide the most cost-effective way for customers to give more people access to more information for better strategy-setting and execution on more business fronts-a necessity for most companies during the current economic climate."

About Vertica

Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware. Co-founded by database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker, Vertica has developed column-oriented analytic database technology that lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The Vertica Analytic Database is available as software only, as an appliance or online as a cloud computing solution. The technology's unmatched speed, scalability, flexibility and ease of use helps customers like JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level 3 Communications and Vonage capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.vertica.com/.