The analytics movement has come far along its growth path since Colin Mahony, the head of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s Vertica business, opened the company’s first annual conference on the database 12 months ago. Information gained in importance among decision-makers, new technology milestones have been reached and the hardware maker signed up yet more customers for the platform.

That continuous pattern of adoption and advancement is driving a tremendous amount of change in the industry, a trend which Mahony appropriately made the topic of his keynote address at the second Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston this month. The presentation started with him lauding the increased attendance and noticeably larger partner presence at the event, symbolic signs of the vendor’s progress over the past year. The way he presented it, HP has completed latest leg in a journey that dates back even before the advent of Vertica  to the early days of the Internet.

Removing the cost barrier: an industry-wide phenomenon

In 1993, the year that the first graphical browser was launched, a dollar bought less than four web pages worth of storage space. That now stands at 35 billion webpages “assuming fairly conservative compression,” according to Mahony. He brought the increase up as a proof point for the rapid decline in storage prices, one of the primary factors moving large-scale analytics into the industry mainstream.

Up until a few years ago, he explained, storing the vast amounts of data needed to put together a comprehensive picture of the bottom line was simply too expensive to be worthwhile for traditional IT departments. Now that cost is no longer a barrier, organizations in all verticals are flocking to solutions such as Vertica in a bid to extract value from their long neglected information troves.

“We’re going from a time when we took a small amount of information and extrapolated what we thought happened – very instinct-driven – to a trend of when information can be collected and analyzed, stored, explored and served so quickly it’s having a profound impact on what we do,” Mahony told the packed audience. The ability to ingest complete datasets instead of relying on restricted subsets as has been done in the past changes the game on business strategy, he said, enabling companies to glean a far more granular understanding of their operations and users than would be possible with sampling.

“People do log everything, because you can. You log everything and you analyze everything, not just what happened but what didn’t: who came to this page and didn’t go to that page, who filled a shopping cart and didn’t end up purchasing,” Mahony highlighted.  That granularity not only translates into better decisions but also eliminates the need for many of the processes developed over the last 35 plus years to circumvent the lack of visibility that business leaders have historically had to grapple with, he elaborated, opening the door for leaner organizational structures.

Making new technology a business reality

HP promises to help customers turn that potential into reality with HAVEn, a suite that combines Vertica with Hadoop, the search technology it obtained as part of the acquisition of Autonomy Inc. and security capabilities in a tightly integrated bundle. Mahony said that the platform provides a unified environment for collecting data from different sources, processing that information into a complete view of the metrics at hand and make the results insights available for applications. He added that the company also sells the infrastructure needed to power the software, from servers and storage arrays to converged appliances that combine the two in a single chassis.

One of the goals behind HAVEn is to help users reduce the tremendous amount of manual work currently involved in producing data insights , but that is not to say HP is looking to cut humans out of the analytics loop. Quite the opposite, according to Mahony. “What we’re trying to do is not just bring the technologies together, but make it a seamless platform so that anybody that’s trying to tap into it can can actually leverage that platform.”