One of the advantages of the Internet is that it allows vendors to create specialized Web sites to build communities of loyal users and for communications.
The latest comes from Hewlett-Packard Co. which today officially opens a marketplace for its Vertica data warehouse analytics platform.
The Vertica Marketplace offers free tools for connecting to databases and visualization tools, according to Jeff Healey, director product marketing for Vertica.
“We wanted to put together an area where developers, partners could post extensions, connectors, data visualization environments, so our community can get closer to building end to end solutions,” he said in an interview.
The idea is that system integrators and software developers can get feedback on their tools and get their solutions to market faster.
Initially HP has seeded the marketplace with a number of tools including a shell, an ODBC loader, an Avro parser, a package for reading XML, a Web analysis package that parses web log files, a Hadoop connector, a connector to HP ArcSight, and a template for creating Vertica database extensions.
There’s also a link to the VoltDB in-memory relational database.
There’s also a platform with R language extensions so R developers can parallelize statistical and machine learning algorithms; Vertica Place, an applications for using geospatial data to create infographics (think of creating maps for the transportation industry); and Vertica Pulse, an application for analyzing short texts in social media and rating them (think of rating how a company brand is doing). To start there’s a connector to Twitter.
Healey said partners may want to use the marketplace to promote a data visualization solutions that Vertica can access.
HP engineers scrutinize code before publishing to ensure security.
Vertica, which offes connectivity to other applications through ODBC, JDBC, ADO.Net, and an API, can link to Amazon Web Services IBM Cognos, MicroStrategy, Tibco Spotfire, SAS, SAP BusinessObjects, Tableau and others.
For ETL (extraction, transformation and loading of data) there are connectors to IBM InfoSphere, Pentaho, Attunity, WebAction and Informatica.
Through a Flex Zone option Vertica can analyze semi-structured data before pulling it into a data warehouse, and unstructured data through an IDOL connector.
Vertica is sold direct from HP [NYSE: HPQ] to certain markets as well as from HP system integrators.
There’s a free community edition for up to 1 TB data across three nodes and no time limit for organizations that want to test it.
In the next few months HP will also release a hardware/software turnkey solution called the Vertica ConvergedSystem 300 Appliance built around HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 Servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
HP says Vertica doesn’t lock data as it loads, as traditional relational databases do, therefore data loads faster than an RDBMS. It has a hybrid in-memory/on-disk architecture to ensure near-real-time availability of information, the company says.