Third annual Horizon Award judges choose Vertica Database for its speed, ease of use and affordability

Third annual Horizon Award judges choose Vertica Database for its speed, ease of use and affordability

Andover, Mass. Aug. 28, 2007 —
Vertica Systems, Inc. today announced that IDG’s Computerworld, the premier source of IT industry news and analysis, selected Vertica as a recipient of its third annual Computerworld Horizon Awards Program distinction for cutting-edge technologies. The Vertica Database – a column-oriented database that enables organizations to query large databases much faster than traditional systems at a fraction of the cost – was chosen by a panel of nine independent technology experts from a pool of 255 applicants.

"The Horizon Awards recognize companies developing innovative, promising technologies which hold the potential to significantly affect enterprises in the near future," said Don Tennant, editor in chief of Computerworld. "Our panel of senior IT executives evaluated submissions from leading corporations, universities and research labs. Vertica earned an honorable mention because it has turned the relational database paradigm on its head, making databases faster, easier to use and more affordable to deploy and operate. All of the award winners are demonstrating leadership in IT management and innovation in their industry sectors."

The Vertica Database was designed specifically to address the needs of companies analyzing large volumes of data to make better, faster decisions on the fly – something 30-year-old online transaction processing (OLTP) databases are struggling to do. The Vertica Database features the latest advances in database technology for read-oriented applications – a column architecture, aggressive data compression, automatic database design, automatic fault tolerance and recovery as well as the ability to run natively on large grids/clusters of industry standard servers with open source Linux.

The Vertica Database enables businesses to cost-efficiently retain much more historical information and access this information with significantly better performance than other systems. Because Vertica is self-optimizing and self-healing, database administrators save valuable time and energy otherwise spent constantly tuning the database for query and load performance, and maintaining caching mechanisms such as materialized views and bitmap indices. Access and integration to the Vertica database is via industry standard SQL which dramatically simplifies integration with existing business intelligence infrastructure and applications.

"This distinction is strong validation," said Andy Palmer, co-founder and CEO of Vertica Systems. "Vertica is committed to delivering innovative products to the database market which help our customers deliver more value to their end users at a lower total cost of ownership. The Vertica database delivers unprecedented query freedom to end users and low total cost of maintenance to IT organizations."

The Horizon Award winners are profiled in a special report in the August 20th issue of Computerworld.