Vertica, an analytic database management software company and a division of Micro Focus International PLC, kicked off its virtual Big Data Conference today after a four-year hiatus.

In his keynote remarks, Colin Mahony, Vertica’s senior vice president and general manager, provided details of the firm’s latest 10.0 release and announced a partnership with Google LLC, according to Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio.

The Vertica 10 release aims to enable intensive variable workloads across cloud and on-premises data centers and includes major updates for operationalizing machine learning at scale and expanding deployment options for Vertica in Eon Mode. The data analytics platform allows companies to unify data silos and leverage deployment models to monetize growth and capture real-time operational opportunities.

“Whereas many traditional database players are getting killed by cloud database providers, Vertica is actually doing a pretty good job of servicing its installed base and is in a reasonable position to compete for new workloads,” Vellante said during his keynote analysis at the start of the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference.

Vellante discussed how Vertica has managed to differentiate itself in the big-data market and investment by Micro Focus to strengthen the company’s innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Independent compute and storage

A key differentiator for Vertica has been its ability, through its Eon Mode architecture, to separate computational resources from the communal storage layer of a database. The latest announcements enhance the company’s ability to increase data availability and scalability while reducing cost in a multicloud world.

“Vertica claims to be the only massively parallel processing columnar store to allow customers to scale compute and storage independently, both in the cloud and hybrid environments,” Vellante said. “Its more robust mature stack, combined with its multicloud strategy, gives Vertica a compelling set of advantages.”

Already available for Amazon S3, Apache Hadoop HDFS, and PureStorage Flashblade, Vertica’s Eon Mode’s extended integration with GCP looks to give end users more choice with public cloud deployment and storage. For all integration points, Eon Mode’s update comes with improved migration capabilities and security improvements to support the administering of TLS certificates and better user authentication and permissions. 

Vertica 10 also comes with boosted scalability for machine learning and internet of things initiatives, now importing models built into other platforms and languages, including Spark, Python and SPSS, with analysis support for production-grade neural networks and custom machine-learning models with pre-trained TensorFlow models.

Vertica was acquired by Hewlett Packard Co. in 2011 and merged with Micro Focus six years later. Micro Focus has continued to make incremental investment for moving Vertica forward.

“They’re investing and allowing them to be semi-autonomous, spending on R&D and go-to-market, and they have no hardware agenda, unlike when Vertica was part of HP,” Vellante noted. “It’s now about taking all of these data troves, bringing machine learning and artificial intelligence into that data to extract insights, and then operationalizing those insights at scale, leveraging cloud. Vertica has done a pretty good job in this regard, and we’re going to look this week for evidence of that innovation.”

Vertica 10 is expected to be available for purchase in the coming weeks, available now on GCP as a Bring Your Own License option.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference. And Vellante wrote a more detailed analysis over on Wikibon, SiliconANGLE’s sister market research firm. (* 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