The Cube’s Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly sat down with Colin Mahony, VP and General Manager, Vertica, at HP Discover 2012 to discuss big data and how Vertica, which Hewlett-Packard acquired in 2011, is supporting the market. As we previously reported, Vertica announced a new release, Vertica 6, during the conference. According to Mahony, most organizations are beginning their big data journey by analyzing what structured data they have available and determining how their existing information can drive new business opportunities.

Although this might sound like the same approach used in traditional enterprise data warehouse projects that have been known to span years, big data vendors like Vertica have changed things a bit. Mahony explained, that the pace of business doesn’t allow companies to take six months attempting to figure out a schema. He went on to say that within Vertica, customers setup three tiers of data utilization:

1. Raw data with very limited schemas
2. Intermediate cleansing and limited schema
3. Traditional normalized data

This allows users to quickly access data and find answers, but retain the flexibility to create traditional “single source of the truth” repositories. Although much of the interview focused on the new features in Vertica 6 and the drivers for the new functionality, the Cube and Mahoney did return to a discussion of the greater industry.

Mahoney said, he does not believe that a dominant player will emerge in the Hadoop market. He doesn’t expect to see a “Red Hat of Hadoop.” There is simply to much innovation in the market. However, what he has been seeing is that Apache has become a lot more proactive about adding features, which is forcing value-added players to innovate faster and go beyond the standard distribution.

When the discussion turned to big data applications, Mahoney admitted that his firm has traditionally focused on being a platform provider – not building applications. However, the firm has been building a few applications internally where Vertica sees a problem repeatedly. Analysis of sensor and click stream data are two areas of innovation that Vertica sees opportunity because no other vendor really has a solution for the problems in the space.

Mahoney said that biggest value that providers can bring to the big data space isn’t technology – it’s solutions. For example, at Vertica they are able to help customers solve big data problems by leveraging knowledge that might have been obtained by solving a problem in another industry. Most organizations simply don’t have enough big data and analytics knowledge internally to optimize the value they are deriving from big data.

Part I of the interview is below.  Click here for Part II.