Some companies in the tech world get bought and sold, like sports trading cards at an auction, and are never seen again. And then there are a fortunate few, such as Vertica Product Group, now part of Micro Focus International PLC, which survive and thrive.

Despite some ups and downs along the way, Vertica is generally included on most lists when major big data players are mentioned. Founded in 2005, acquired by Hewlett Packard in 2011, and ultimately merged with Micro Focus when Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sold off its troubled software business in 2017, Vertica has managed to retain value as a key enterprise player, which HP failed to see.

What Leo Apotheker, HP’s chief executive officer in 2011 and the shortest tenured chief executive in the company’s history, missed was that big data was only going to get bigger. Vertica has ridden this wave effectively, despite bumps along the way, and one person who has been there for nearly the entire 15-year ride was Colin Mahony.

“We know the volumes aren’t slowing down,” said Mahony (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of Vertica. “We know the complexity isn’t slowing down, with the things that people want to do with artificial intelligence and machine learning. People were going to trust us to put enormous amounts of data in our platform, and what we owe everyone else is lots of analytics to take advantage of that.”

Mahony spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. They discussed the key elements of Vertica’s big data strategy, the company’s partnerships with major industry players, and how the firm meets customer needs as a cloud database. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features Colin Mahony as our Guest of the Week.

Separating compute from storage

Micro Focus has largely left Vertica to be an independent brand, letting Mahony run the show. One sign that the parent company is bullish about Vertica’s prospects can be found in its most recent earnings call. Micro Focus CEO Stephen Murdoch told analysts that his company would make at least $70 million of incremental investment in only two areas: security and Vertica.

Why would Micro Focus press its bet on Vertica? One reason is that although Mahony’s company supports the major cloud platforms, it has also carefully positioned itself as a viable alternative to cloud-native database providers.

A key part of Vertica’s strategy is Eon Mode, the company’s architecture for variable workloads that scales cloud infrastructure to meet peak demand. Eon Mode separates compute from storage, providing Vertica with a unique advantage in disaggregating compute for both cloud and on-premises environments.

“For us, that separation is not just about being able to take advantage of cloud economics as we do or the economics of object storage,” Mahony explained. “It’s also about being able to truly isolate workloads and set the platform to do autonomous things in the database. Whether it’s public cloud or a private cloud on-premises, giving our customers the flexibility and choice to run Vertica wherever it makes sense for them is something we are very committed to from a flexibility standpoint.”

Key partnerships propel adoption

Vertica has demonstrated that commitment through a series of carefully orchestrated partnerships. In 2018, Vertica extended its Eon Mode support to customers in the Amazon Web Services Inc. ecosystem.

The following year, it cemented an agreement to provide Eon Mode functionality for Pure Storage Inc. and then backed that up last month with a similar deployment on Google Cloud Platform as part of its Vertica 10 release.

“There’s just a massive disruption going on in the world around object storage,” Mahony noted. “There’s a lot of lock-in products out there, there’s a lot of cloud only products. Now more than ever we’re hearing from our customers that they want the flexibility to be able to run anywhere, but they want the ease of use and simplicity of native cloud experiences.”

Vertica 10 also deepens integration with analytics tools, such as TensorFlow and Python, for unsupervised learning. This has been an important focus for Vertica as it caters to data scientists who want to use popular languages and tools that can leverage increasingly larger volumes of data.

An example of how Vertica supports enterprise organizations in this endeavor can be found in a company that manages billing and customer communications for hundreds of thousands of users daily — Uber Inc. Vertica is the analytics engine behind Uber’s data warehouse, processing hundreds of thousands of SQL queries every day from the ride-sharing company’s extensive network of business units.

“We continue to deepen our Python integration, building off an open-source project with Uber, who has been a great customer and partner,” Mahony said. “We know that we’re not going to come up with the world’s best algorithms, nor is that our focus. Our advantage is we have this massively parallel platform to ingest, store, manage and analyze the data.”

Running in the cloud

While Vertica has carefully cultivated relationships with major cloud providers, Mahony is succinct in defending his firm’s position in the cloud-native world. Vertica is being run in the cloud, and that’s a critical role for the company going forward because it all comes back to data and how it is consumed.

“A huge part of cloud has nothing to do with the technology; it’s how you consume the product,” Mahony said. “We have hundreds of customers who are running Vertica in the cloud, and we are a great cloud database. We run very well on the three major clouds and some of the other clouds as well in other parts of the world.”

As with many companies in Silicon Valley, Vertica’s roots extend well before its founding in 2005. One engineer who was instrumental in launching the firm was Michael Stonebraker, a Turing Award recipient who was perhaps best known for inventing the Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System, or INGRES, in the 1970s and then Post INGRES, or Postgres, during the following decade.

Postgres improved on INGRES through the addition of object-oriented programming, which would later drive many of the analytics tools that power the big-data industry today. New technologies give rise to new firms, which in turn spawn more new technologies. And the cycle constantly repeats itself. For Mahony, he’s proud that the company on which he built his corporate career remains part of the ever-changing conversation today.

“It’s the software industry, so nothing stays the same,” Mahony admitted. “Probably the only thing that stays the same is the name Vertica.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Vertica Big Data Conference. Neither Vertica, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE