vertica-connector-for-hadoop1Hewlett-Packard is building a bridge between traditional SQL database analytics and Big Data on Hadoop systems. The result is HP Vertica for SQL on Hadoop.

HP officially unveiled the new offering today — though reports about the offering (previously code-named Dragline) surfaced in May 2014.

At the time, HP said, “expanded SQL-on-Hadoop exploration and cost-optimized storage eliminates the need to move data and supports even more formats for data exploration, including Parquet, Thrift, Avro and CEF. Businesses can now ingest, explore and visualize more data more quickly and easily with their choice of Business Intelligence/data visualization environments.”

With today’s announcement, HP also confirms that the SQL-on-Hadoop support is vendor agnostic. In other words, HP’s offering will work with such leading Hadoop distributions as Apache Hadoop, Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR.

Giants Seek Big Data Success

With an eye toward Big Data offerings, HP, IBM and other enterprise IT giants have been working overtime to diversify beyond traditional hardware and software sales. But the efforts have yielded mixed results. In HP’s Q3 2014 results, announced in Aug. 2014, the company said its software revenue declined about 5 percent vs. Q3 2013. The decline included a dip in the Vertica business — though HP didn’t disclose the actual percentage figure.

IBM, meanwhile, continues to ramp up its portfolio of Big Data offerings — expanding its Watson application efforts into verticals like health care, while pushing traditional analytics software like Cognos into the cloud. Those efforts arrive amid a stark reality: Overall IBM revenues have been flat or fallen for 10 consecutive quarters. Source