Vertica is the one bright star in what otherwise is a dismal quarter for HP that saw CEO Meg Whitman warn of a no-growth fiscal year and announce a management shake-up in HP’s Enterprise Group, writes Wikibon Principal Research Contributor Jeff Kelly. HP reported an 8 percent year-to-year revenue decrease to $27.2B for the quarter down across all its major groups except the software division, and company stock dropped more than 6 percent in after-hours trading after Thursday’s announcement.

Software revenue was up 1 percent year-to-year and 4.3 percent from the second quarter to $27.2B. In her analyst conference call Whitman cited Vertica’s “momentum” and said it saw “triple-digit growth” in the quarter as the driver of this performance. HP did not break out Vertica’s revenue, but Wikibon conservatively estimates its Q3 revenue at between $20M and $30M. By comparison, Wikibon estimates its revenue for all of FY 2012 at $45M.

HP purchased Vertica three years ago. Kelly says the cause of the delayed reaction is that HP needed those years to realign its sales force, which had little previous experience selling enterprise software. Now Vertica is being brought into much larger deals than in past years, and HP is doing a better job of marketing it, particularly as part of its HAVEn Big Data platform.

Vertica users Wikibon has talked to recently are pleased with the technology and related support. To maintain that momentum, Kelly writes, HP must continue to invest in achieving the goals Colin Mahony, the software division VP and GM, has outlined: Make it easy to load data into Vertica, allow users to perform as many types of interactive analytics as possible, and allow administrators to deploy it on-premise or in the Cloud.

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