What a year to make a comeback. After a four-year hiatus, the Vertica Big Data Conference was all set to return this month, until the novel coronavirus came along.

The rapidly spreading virus has caused an unprecedented number of cancellations of in-person events impacting every industry, from sports games to film festivals to technology conferences. Instead of letting the COVID-19 virus stop the Vertica Big Data Conference dead in its tracks, however, Vertica (a division of Micro Focus International PLC) has rapidly pivoted to a digital format and is already seeing great interest.

“We’ve seen the registration spike,” said Jeff Healey, senior director of Vertica product marketing at Micro Focus in a recent interview with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming mobile studio. “We just hit 1,000, and we’re planning on having about 1,000 at the physical event. It’s growing and growing. We’re going to see those big numbers, and it’s not going to be a one-time thing.”

Recorded from the safety of remote locations, Healey and Vellante discussed expectations for the upcoming digital conference, scheduled for March 31-April 1, how Vertica will retain its event’s uniquely engineer-centric vibe, and how the company has risen to the challenges of market changes in big data since its inception nearly 15 years ago. (* Disclosure below.)

While many tech conferences traditionally feature plenty of company hype and sales and marketing presentations, Vertica’s Big Data Conference focuses strictly on applied use cases and real-world insights into how data is transforming the enterprise, fully shining the spotlight on engineers and practitioners. Featured topics during this year’s digital event include “Creating Predictive Models to Maximize Clinical System Availability,” “End-to-End Security,” “Putting Complex Data Types to Work,” and “The Road to Autonomous Database Management.”

Vertica data analytics platform ‘will forever be independent from underlying infrastructure’

The global big data and business analytics market continues to trend upward, moving from $122 billion in 2015 to $171 billion in 2018 — and this number is projected to hit $512 billion by 2026, according to a recent market research report from Allied Market Research. “Surge in adoption of big data analytics software by multiple organizations, and rise in demand for cloud-based big data analytics software among SMEs fuel the growth of the global big data and business analytics market,” according to the report.

The competition in the market has remained fierce over the past decade, with many big data startups failing or being gobbled up and integrated into existing platforms. And while Vertica Systems, founded in 2005, was later acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2011 and then by Micro Focus in 2017 — as part of the Micro Focus-Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. merger — Vertica has remained an independent brand.

Vertica’s success seems to stem from its goal of being a single core platform that can address all analytical needs. Its columnar storage platform differs from standard relational database management systems in the way it stores data, which allows for faster-than-usual query performance. As an SQL analytics database, it provides high availability with exabyte scalability on commodity hardware. AT&T, Cerner, Intuit and Uber are a few corporations currently using Vertica to generate more timely data insights.

“We’re an analytical database platform, and we’re constantly just working on that one source code base to make sure we don’t provide a bunch of different technologies and databases and different types of technologies need to stitch together,” Healey explained. “This platform just has unbelievable universal capabilities, from everything from running analytics at scale, to in-database machine learning with the different approach, to all different types of deployment models that are supported.”

To this end, Vertica allows users to scale big data processes without adding dreaded complexities, thanks to its Eon Mode. Available on Amazon Web Services and on-premises via Pure Storage FlashBlade technology, Eon Mode simplifies database operations and addresses variable workloads by separating compute from storage and combining Amazon S3 object storage with variable compute capacity based on workload demands.

Micro Focus invests big money in Vertica and security portfolio

With confident self-awareness and over a decade of staying power, Vertica has proven critical to its parent company, as Micro Focus recently announced a $70-$80 million incremental investment in the big data platform alongside security. With its efforts to break down data silos and integrate with existing public cloud platforms, including Amazon S3 and Azure’s Hadoop Distributed File Systems, Vertica sees demand picking up for multicloud solutions. 

“There have been a lot of changes in the industry, and there’s lots of competition. One thing we’ve stayed true to is, we know who we are — an analytical database platform,” Healey said.

Vertica is also pushing development in machine learning and other opportunities to apply data science, as its appeal evolves from being merely fast at running big data queries to providing analytical use cases from which an entire organization can benefit.

How to watch theCUBE interviews

We offer you various ways to watch the live coverage of the Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020, including theCUBE’s dedicated website and YouTube. You can also get all the coverage from this year’s events on SiliconANGLE.

Livestream of Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020

The Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 is a livestream event, with additional interviews to be broadcasted on theCUBE. You can register for free here to access the live coverage. You can also watch it on theCUBE’s dedicated page and YouTube channel.

TheCUBE Insights podcast

SiliconANGLE also has podcasts available of archived interview sessions, available on iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify, which you can enjoy while on the go.

Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 Topics and Speakers Include:

March 31

• Winning BIG with DATA

• Colin Mahony, SVP & GM, Vertica 

• How Modern Infrastructure Accelerates Modern Analytics

• Amy Fowler, Vice President, Strategy and Solutions, FlashBlade at Pure Storage

• Changing the Analytics Game at AT&T

• John Yovanovich, IT Director, AT&T

• Vertica in Eon Mode: Past, Present, and Future – brought to you by Pure Storage

• Yuanzhe Bei, Vertica Engineering and Dave Sprogis, Vertica Product Management

• The Data-Driven Prognosis: Creating Predictive Models to Maximize Clinical System Availability

• Mauro Barbieri, Lead Architect Analytics, Philips

• Optimizing Query Performance and Resource Pool Tuning

• Rakesh Bankula and Bir Abhimanu Thakur, Vertica Best Practices

• Model Management and Data Preparation

• Waqas Dhillon, Vertica Product Management and Arash Jalal Zadeh Fard, Vertica Engineering

• Migrating Your Vertica Cluster to the Cloud

• Chris Daly and Sumeet Keswani, Vertica Best Practices

• How The Trade Desk Reports Against Two 320-node Clusters Packed with Raw Data

• Ron Cormier, Sr. Vertica Database Engineer; The Trade Desk

• Vertica @ Uber Scale

• Girish Baliga, Uber Engineering Manager, Big Data

• A Technical Overview of Vertica Architecture

• Ryan Roelke, Vertica Engineering

April 1

• The Next-Generation Data Underlying Architecture of Vertica for Top Performance at Extreme Scale

• Chuck Bear, Vertica Engineering

• A Deep Dive into the Vertica Management Console Enhancements and Roadmap

• Bhavik Gandhi and Natalia Stavisky, Vertica Engineering

• Extending Vertica with the Latest Vertica Ecosystem and Open Source Initiatives

• Tom Wall, Vertica Engineering

• Keep Data Private – Prepare and Analyze Without Unencrypting with Voltage SecureData for Vertica

• Rich Gaston, Global Solutions Architect, Security Risk and Governance, Micro Focus

• End-to-End Security

• Chris Morris and Fen Fawkes, Vertica Engineering

• The Shortest Path to Vertica – Best Practices for Data Warehouse Migration and ETL

• Marco Gessner and Maurizio Felici, Vertica Field Engineering 

• Putting Complex Data Types to Work

• Deepak Majeti, Vertica Engineering

• Autonomous Log Monitoring: Zero-Touch Incident Detection and Root-Cause Indication for Any Application

• Larry Lancaster, Founder and CTO Zebrium

• Vertica Database Designer – Today and Tomorrow

• Yuanzhe Bei, Vertica Engineering

• The Road to Autonomous Database Management: How Domo is Delivering SLAs for Less

• Ben White, Domo Senior Database Engineer

• Sizing and Configuring Vertica in Eon Mode for Different Use Cases

• Shrirang Kamat and Sumeet Keswani, Vertica Best Practices

• Tapping Vertica’s Integration with TensorFlow for Advanced Machine Learning

• George Larionovm, Vertica Engineering

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020. Neither Micro Focus International PLC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Image: Vertica