HP Debuts App Store for Vertica

There are no free lunches in big data analytics. But Hewlett-Packard is making sure there’s plenty of free software to go around with Vertica Marketplace, a new website unveiled today that allows users to browse and download software from HP and its partners. The company also debuted three free add-ons for its column-oriented data store that deliver capabilities in the areas of geospatial tracking, running big R workloads, and sentiment analysis.

HP is trying the app store concept with big data

HP launched its new Vertica Marketplace to make it easy for existing customers, prospective customers, and those who are data-curious to browse various products that work with HP’s analytic data warehouse. Building a big data analytics stack is not an easy process, and HP hopes that organizing the various product categories in a logical manner will help users with their projects.

“What we heard from the user and partner community is there’s more and more technology required, everything from ETL tools to visualization products to connectors and add-ons,” says Jeff Healey, director of product marketing for HP Vertica. “The idea is to provide a destination where anyone involved with big data analytics can download the software and start building out solutions.”

The website’s layout and the preponderance of free software will make it seem very familiarity to anybody who has browsed one of the mobile application marketplaces like Apple’s iTunes Store and Google’s Play Store. The app store concept is slowly making its way into the enterprise software (IBM was a pioneer with its 2012 launch of the Pure Systems Centre). And while installing and configuring an enterprise software product such as HP’s Vertica goes well beyond pressing your finger on an icon for the latest Angry Birds game, the amount of free software and the ready access to downloadable .exes makes the app store approach quite apropos in this space at this time.

There are only a few dozen products listed on Vertica Marketplace at this time, from HP partners such as VoltDB, LogiAnalytics, Looker, and others. Getting a product listed does require you to be a partner and to have your submission accepted by HP. But the idea appears worthwhile, if only because HP also provides a free version of Vertica called the Community Edition that’s identical in every respect to the Enterprise edition, except that it can only hold 1TB of data across three nodes.

There’s quite a bit one could do with a three-node Vertica cluster loaded with 1TB of data. And with the introduction of three additional add-ons from HP today, there’s even more.

The first freebie is an in-memory clustering solution for routines written in R. This offering will be useful for any developer who has struggled to fit their models within the limited confines of a laptop, says Luis Maldonado, director of product management for HP Vertica. “Their models could really benefit from having a larger amount of data than they can fit on a single machine,” he says. “We’ve been hearing from the initial testers here that they’re able to run models and validation across data size they didn’t think was possible.”

The second freebie provides geospatial tracking capabilities to Vertica. Users will be able to centrally store and analyze geospatial data collected from any sources, such as people or assets in the field. Plus, the offering allows users to combine and analyze the geospatial data in concert with other data sets stored in Vertica, Maldonado says.

The new social and sentiment analysis product will allow customers to see what the world is saying about their company or products. “We do entity analysis and sentiment analysis for streams of data coming from things like Twitter and Facebook and small review sites such as TripAdvisor, where people are expressing sentiment about a product, a service, etc.” Maldonado says. “They’re able to quickly understand issues, identify them and in fact predict where they might go wrong.”

The Vertica Marketplace is located at www.vertica.com/marketplace.

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