Being able to handle massive amounts of Big Data can help a company keep a step ahead of its competition, and Hewlett-Packard, Co. is hoping to provide the platform to help companies gain the lead. Real-time data in particular can empower businesses to gain significant insights into the way their organization works compared to the competition, and HP has been developing a portfolio of Big Data solutions to address these very business needs.

Acquired by HP in 2011, Vertica has been developing database analytic software in an attempt to meet its customers’ growing needs. Colin Mahony, GM at HP Vertica, sat down with John Furrier and Dave Vellante of theCUBE at the HP Vertica Big Data Conference 2014 to discuss HP Vertica’s goals for providing customers with a platform to handle data.

One size does not fit all

Even though Vertica started out as a feature company, it evolved over the years to become a provider of Big Data analytic tools using such programs as Hadoop. And while a lot of its competition still uses older technology, Vertica utilizes newer and faster technologies designed specifically for handling larger data sets.

When asked how HP Vertica stands apart from its competitors, Mahony’s responded, “We were operating, and still do, under the premise that one size does not fit all. And we knew if we created the right foundation, the right architecture, and we built it from the ground up, we could then add on the right capabilities.”

Mahony noted that his clients’ rivals often use decades-old technology that was never designed for today’s workloads. “They have a lot of functionality, but they can’t figure out the scale and they can’t figure out the performance, at least not economically,” he said. “We figured that out first.”

Closing the gap with automation

With an ever-increasing amount of data comes the need to analyze more and more patterns of data. When asked what HP Vertica was doing to close the gap between the amount of data it could actually analyze compared to the increasing amount available, Mahony responded, “We need to augment and, to a certain extent, automate some of what we do through the processing power on the computers to be able to deliver those insights.”

The process will never replace what humans can do from a human intelligence standpoint, Mahony added, but managers and practitioners get inundated with information.

“Even if we can just help focus into a certain area of information and alleviate some of that work, then it makes everyone much more productive,” he said.

See Mahony’s entire segment below: