Cloud analytics rising star GoodData has signed up as a customer of HP Vertica to better address the performance and scalability requirements of enterprise customers amid increasing demand for its service. The deal represents a notable development in HP’s partner ecosystem, garnering support during a turbulent time of reorganization.

Vertica is a high-performance columnar database built to handle large amounts of data that Hewlett-Packard obtained in the acquisition of Vertica Systems in 2011. The platform is a cornerstone of the vendor’s long-term software strategy and is among the handful of businesses where it is seeing tangible revenue growth, albeit from a small base. As a result, every new client counts, especially if it’s on as aggressive a trajectory as GoodData.

The venture-backed startup reported that it doubled the size of its customer base last year and generated $78 million in sales, according to Wikibon research. Approximately one-third of those sales came from Big Data projects. Its recently introduced Open Analytics Platform, which is available in the cloud, provides a comprehensive set of services spanning the entire analytics lifecycle, from the initial collection phase to data processing, visualization and business intelligence.

GoodData claims that migrating from the unnamed traditional data warehouse to Vertica will lead to performance improvements, with some queries now being executed orders of magnitude faster then before and dashboards and reports seeing  dramatic improvements as well.

“GoodData’s core competency is the BI and visualization layer, making it easy for business users to visualize and interact with data all via a SaaS application,” notes Wikibon principal research contributor Jeff Kelly. “By moving to HP Vertica as the data warehouse layer, GoodData will now be able to scale to Big Data-sized workloads and provide better performance at scale.”

In addition to implementing Vertica under the hood, GoodData is making the capabilities of the software available directly to customers through a new data warehousing service that’s now included in its Open Analytics Platform. The service provides a centralized interface for  scheduling, deploying and monitoring operations, which the company said extends across the “complete history” of information from load to visualization.

The service keeps the analytics processes decoupled from the data source, which can be either file storage or Hadoop, to allow for each side of the equation to be changed independently.

GoodData said that it also takes care of the underlying plumbing work, including clustering and resource allocation, while providing safeguards against data loss. That combination eliminates a lot of the hassle involved in managing on-premise analytical environments while also addressing the reliability concerns that have traditionally held back some organizations from moving data to the cloud.

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