Shilpa Lawande, Vice President of Software Engineering and Customer Support for HP Vertica joined Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly in theCUBE. In SiliconANGLE’s ongoing coverage of HP Vertica’s Big Data Conference the three discuss the offerings and strategies that make Vertica unique. Lawande also explains how the company plans to grow through internal development.

According to Lawande, Vertica “probably [runs] some of the largest analytics installations now.” As a result, providing more users access to analytics is a major goal for the company. She believes Vertica has made a profound technical contribution in enhancing compute capacity that helps customers scale out. Recognizing current technological trends and customer needs, Vertica provides solutions that shift the burden from the disk to the CPU.

Vellante inquires about Vertica’s stated aspiration to “allow ISDs to accommodate 100 percent of their data for developers.” Lawande explains that was designed to be very modular. Since its fifth release the company has started to put on APIs that provide accessibility into sources where users can plug in data. Leveraging the ecosystem of partners helps Vertica the ability to handle data over time. Lawande notes, “We have taken great care to make sure the APIs we put out really give you performance as close as possible.”

Vellante also inquires about the relevance of Flash given that it was initially expensive and nearly impossible to leverage. Lawande says that flexibility is built into Vetica to accommodate multiple types of storage. For example, she posits, “You could run Vertica completely in-memory if you want…we’re fairly agnostic to all types of performance types.” Lawande acknowledges that there are some use cases where Flash is useful, but not as necessary as it may be in other environments.

Kelly asks about challenges the company may have experienced in bringing different types of technology together to allow end-users to get the best of various systems. Lawande maintains that it is important to not have a monolithic offering, but provide loose integration. Keeping solutions separate allows users to select components that make the most sense for analyzing different types of data.

Going forward, Vertica aims to grow the community of Vertica users and professionals formally and informally. The company aims to increase contributed user content to its github community to enhance knowledge of best practices and use-cases. The are also developing certifications so that customers can easily identify Vertica professionals.

In terms of internal development, Lawande says the company will continue to maintain and attract high caliber talent. The company has an apprenticeship model for new employees, allowing them to work with seasoned professionals. At the same time, new employees are expected to contribute right away. Lawande describes Vertica as a collaborative culture with a challenging and inclusive environment.