First annual “Data Disruptors Awards” caps Vertica Unify 2021

“Vertica has been powering the world’s data disruptors for a decade, including companies that have created new industries, and have had an impact on the environment, and on the health of humans and animals.” Those were the opening comments by Joy King, Vertica’s VP of Product and Go-to-Market Strategy, at Thursday morning’s opening session for Vertica Unify 2021.

“I’m proud to present the first-ever Data Disruptors awards to the companies that help us live, eat, shop, and stay safe and healthy,” she said. “This is about analytics at unimaginable scale. Delivering predictive analytics in time to take action is what drives the winners in every race, and that’s what defines these data disruptors and their awards,” King said.

What follows are the award categories and criteria, as well as who won and why.

 

Top “Powered by Vertica” Analytic Solution

This award is for a product, service, or solution that has “Vertica inside” as its underlying embedded analytical engine.

Winner: Cisco Secure Network Analytics

Cisco Secure Network Analytics (formerly Stealthwatch) provides customers with network-wide visibility, automatic threat detection, and real-time forensic investigation and resolution workflows.  Never has it been more important to identify and act on threats against our data than now, and Vertica is proud to play a key role in protecting Cisco’s customers.  Cisco uses Vertica as its analytics database on Cisco servers, the likes of which have the fastest memory, networking capability, processing power and the fattest, fastest disk drives to get the analytics job done.

“The Cisco/Vertica collaboration has been absolutely outstanding – from day one – leading to a best-in-breed solution that delights our customers and has more than met our expectations.” – Carol Iturralde, Principal Engineer, Cisco Systems

 

Top Analytics Growth at Massive Scale

This award goes to a company whose petabytes and multi-hundred node clusters partly define their Vertica analytics environment. This is what a real, mission-critical, analytically intensive workload is all about.

Winner: The Trade Desk

The Trade Desk was recently identified as a Millionaire Maker stock, and they were right! The Trade Desk ended 2020 with a 26% growth in revenue, while net income more than doubled year over year.  That’s what we mean by Growth at Massive Scale.

The Trade Desk bids on hundreds of thousands of auctions per second, with 40,000 reports processed by Vertica each day, based on data at multi petabyte scale. The Trade Desk needs the reliability and performance that only Vertica can deliver as it revolutionizes digital and programmatic advertising, supporting buyers and helping agencies and brands spend their advertising budget in a more targeted, smarter way.

“The key difference with Vertica is its maturity. There are a lot of other databases out there, column stores specifically, but don’t offer the maturity we need at our scale. Being able to specify alternate Projections, or different sort orders on the data, for instance, is huge. As the original column-store analytics platform, Vertica has had time to build maturity into their features, and other column stores, cloud-based, otherwise are all playing catch up.”  Bert Corderman, Senior Manager of Engineering, The Trade Desk

 

Top Analytics Start-Up

For the company that just might be the next data unicorn with analytics in their start-up DNA.

Winner: EOITEK

EOITEK is a start-up company based in Shanghai that offers an AIOps solution to big name customers including China Unionpay, China Eastern Airline, China National Development Bank, and Haier. Powered by Vertica and its advanced analytics and machine learning, EOITEK quickly learned how to deliver their customers 10 times faster performance on 80% less hardware.  When you’re growing at Start Up speed, this is the kind of advantage that makes a difference.

“Leveraging Vertica, we reduce our clients’ hardware requirements through a data compression ratio of 5:1, lowering their TCO. We deliver a tenfold performance improvement with a hybrid data storage approach, and Vertica’s advanced analytics capabilities help our clients with capacity planning and trend prediction.” – Xiaobe Ge, Chief Technology Officer, EOITEK

 

Top Analytics in the Cloud

For a company running Vertica in the cloud or multi-clouds with amazing benefits and cloud innovation.

Winner: MassMutual

MassMutual uses Vertica at the center of an ever-evolving, company-wide data platform that provides analytics and reporting based on multiple ETL processes and fast-moving queries on a near-continuous basis. A metadata catalog offers up subsets of the S3-based data lake, and provides machine learning built into a serverless state machine to handle schema changes.

“Vertica stays in touch with its customers. They really sit down with you and have those conversations about what are your needs … helped us figure out the best ways to get our data over from Enterprise Mode into Eon Mode very quickly and very efficiently.” – Joe Gonzalez, Vertica Data Warehouse Admin, MassMutual

 

Top Analytics in On-Premises and Hybrid Environments

For a company working to future-proof its analytics by taking advantage of Vertica’s broad deployment models to run some workloads in your data center and others in hybrid environments.

Winner: Taboola

Taboola is a well-known player in the AdTech space who needs the unlimited scale that only Vertica can offer combined with very high user concurrency.  Just yesterday, Taboola shared some amazing growth insight into its Taboola News offering, which now powers personalized News Feeds in Over 80 Countries. That means 220 million monthly engagements on editorial content through these mobile device and OEM partnerships, which has seen an increase of more than 270% year-over-year.

To deliver this personalized experience for all of these users, Taboola performs in-depth analytics at scale, with Vertica analyzing more than 300 terabytes of data per day across a total store that exceeds 1 petabyte. Taboola uses 130 Vertica nodes in +7 clusters, and processes 6.3 million queries daily. Vertica is proud to be the beating heard of Taboola’s hybrid platform.

“The rapid growth we have been experiencing required robust, enterprise-grade support in data analytics. With Vertica as the compute engine at the heart of our data, we can now offer a fully scalable analytics offering with higher user concurrency and performance.” – Keren Bartal, Director of Data Engineering, Taboola

 

Machine Learning Master of the Year

For the organization that runs Vertica’s in-database machine learning at scale to deliver complete accuracy in their predictive analytics.

Winner: Euro Information

Euro Information is the technological subsidiary of a major banking group in France, Crédit Mutuel. Euro Information manages the IT systems of 16 Crédit Mutuel subdivisions, the entire CIC banking group and its set of financial, tech, insurance, real estate, consumer credits, private banks, and funding subsidiaries. Last year, they began to incorporate Vertica machine learning to provide superior analytics to all the business groups they serve. They centralized data using Vertica, and are using the VerticaPy library in their Machine Learning practices.

“Taking advantage of in-database machine learning, we now support use cases we could not handle before.” – Gaëtan Dion, Project Manager, Big Data & Machine Learning, Euro Information

 

Analytics for the Greater Good of the Year

For the organization that uses Vertica’s analytics and machine learning to improve our lives, our society, and our world.

Winner: The Climate Corporation (a subsidiary of Bayer)

“This award is one that is near and dear to my heart as I speak to you from the state of North Carolina in the United States, a state which plays a very important role in feeding the human population given the large amount of agriculture and farmland we have here,” said Joy King.

We live in a world where the human population is growing but farmland is shrinking. That means that farmers need all the help they can get to optimize crop production in an efficient and environmentally safe way. The Climate Corporation has created an application called FieldView, which integrates geospatial, weather, soil chemistry, historical crop data and so much more to help farmers sustainably enhance yield potential, improve efficiency, and manage their risk. To do this involves a lot of data, and a lot of complex correlations. The future of sustainable agriculture requires maintaining data on millions of acres, and the data has to be clean, well-curated and organized, across a range of geographical and management conditions.

“Vertica is very proud to be helping farmers around the world feed us all and our families, King added.

“Vertica’s analytical and spatial functions allow The Climate Corporation to sift through the diverse data sets and get an accurate lay of the land to enable decisions from the direction of new products to the accuracy of our scientific models.” – Erich Hochmuth, Senior Director of Data and Analytics, The Climate Corporation

 

Unified Analytics Implementation of the Year

For the organization that adopts Vertica’s unified analytics approach to analyze data wherever it may reside, regardless of location or data format.

Winner: Cerner

The scale of Cerner’s systems built on Vertica is astounding. More than 90,000 software agents are distributed across servers, switches, and clients around the globe, collecting and analyzing the performance and usage of Cerner’s Millenium Electronic Medical Records platform.  All told, 1.5 billion rows of new operational data are committed to Vertica each hour, and the total footprint exceeds 2 petabytes of compressed data. Cerner’s two separate Vertica-based systems are deployed on-premises in two separate data centers but with a fully unified approach near Cerner’s headquarters in Kansas City, Missouri. The next step is the public cloud, bringing their unified analytics deployment requirements to a whole new level.

“There are customers all around the world that want deployments in their regions. As soon as they get wind that it’s possible with Vertica in Eon Mode, they’re going to demand that their data also be moved over to AWS.” – Dan Woicke, senior director of CernerWorks Engineering.

Congratulations to all our award winners, for your innovations and successes! And thanks for helping us showcase Vertica’s power and versatility.

 

Find all the recorded content for Vertica Unify 2021 online. Simply sign with your Unify ID; and if you couldn’t attend Unify last week, you can still register and gain free access to technical breakout sessions, keynotes, and more.