You made the right call choosing Vertica. Let's be clear about that from the start.
When you evaluated analytics platforms years ago, Vertica represented cutting-edge columnar storage, impressive compression ratios and the kind of performance that made executives sit up and take notice. It was a smart, data-driven decision that served your organization well. You built critical insights, powered dashboards and probably saved your company millions through better decision-making.
But here's the thing about being smart with technology: smart people adapt when circumstances change.
The uncomfortable truth about ownership musical chairs
If you're feeling a growing sense of unease about Vertica's future, you're not imagining things. The platform has been through more ownership changes than most of us have had job changes — sold in 2011, again in 2018 and most recently acquired by OpenText in 2023.
This isn't just corporate trivia. Each transition results in the platform operating under broader enterprise software strategies that may not prioritize the specialized needs of high-performance analytics users.
Since the OpenText acquisition, the warning signs are harder to ignore. Many enterprises report declining innovation momentum, with limited development of new capabilities specifically designed for modern analytics workloads, while simultaneously experiencing significant cost increases. Your specialized Vertica knowledge is diluted within a larger enterprise software organization, and you're probably feeling it in your support interactions.
When "good enough" becomes "not good enough"
Remember when 10-20 second query responses felt fast? Your business requirements have evolved, and frankly, so have your users' expectations. Companies using Vertica increasingly encounter critical limitations including inadequate ingestion performance and concurrency issues that prevent teams from meeting real-time analytics requirements.
Here's what keeps analytics leaders up at night: architectural rigidity. Vertica's architecture — while powerful for traditional data warehouse scenarios — lacks the flexibility required for modern hybrid workloads, particularly with JSON processing, which is increasingly critical for modern applications.
You're probably managing this complexity with workarounds, additional infrastructure investments and increasingly complex architectures just to maintain the rigid separation between transactional and analytical workloads.
The real cost of standing still
Let's talk about what "staying the course" actually costs. Beyond the escalating licensing fees and vendor lock-in risks, there's an opportunity cost that's harder to quantify but more devastating: the competitive advantage you're not gaining.
While you're wrestling with Vertica's limitations, your competitors are delivering sub-second analytics, enabling real-time personalization and building AI-powered applications that require machine learning model training and inference capabilities.. The gap between what your infrastructure delivers and what your business needs is widening.
A different path forward
This is where SingleStore enters the conversation — not as another vendor pitch, but as a fundamentally different approach to the challenges you're facing.
SingleStore provides a unified engine capable of handling transactional, analytical and AI workloads simultaneously, eliminating the architectural complexity that enterprises face with separate systems. Instead of managing multiple systems and complex ETL processes, you get real-time analytics on live transactional data.
The performance improvements are measurable: real-time analytics for time-sensitive applications with sub-second query performance versus the 10-20 seconds you might be experiencing with Vertica. Companies achieve millisecond-scale analytics for real-time fraud detection and dramatic improvements in user experience.
Perhaps most importantly, SingleStore's modern data architecture provides native support for JSON and built-in vector storage and similarity search capabilities, enabling AI-powered applications and machine learning workloads. This isn't just about solving today's problems — it's about positioning for tomorrow's opportunities.
The migration reality check
"But migrations are risky, expensive and time-consuming," you're thinking. Fair point. Except the data tells a different story.
Organizations complete comprehensive migrations to SingleStore in under 100 working days, with tools and validation processes ensuring complete data accuracy during transition. The migration approach is structured and proven, with parallel system operation during migration phases allowing for thorough verification before cutover.
Companies achieve significant cost reductions through elimination of high Vertica renewal fees, infrastructure consolidation and reduced operational complexity. But the real value comes from performance-driven revenue impact: faster decision making, improved customer experience and competitive advantages that enable new product capabilities.
The choice you already know you need to make
You didn't get to where you are by avoiding difficult decisions. You got here by making smart, forward-thinking choices about technology that positioned your organization for success.
The same analytical thinking that led you to choose Vertica originally is probably telling you now that the landscape has shifted. The question isn't whether you'll eventually need to modernize your analytics infrastructure — it's whether you'll lead that transition or be forced into it by competitive pressure.
Your future self will thank you for making this decision strategically, on your timeline, rather than reactively when systems start failing or costs become prohibitive.
Take the next step
If you're ready to explore what modern analytics infrastructure could mean for your organization, let's start with a conversation. Not a sales pitch — a technical discussion between analytics professionals about the challenges you're facing and the solutions that make sense for your specific situation.
Because the smartest decision you made choosing Vertica then can inform the smartest decision you make choosing what comes next.
Ready to explore your options? Let's schedule a technical assessment to evaluate how SingleStore could address your specific Vertica challenges — no obligations, just honest analysis from people who understand enterprise analytics.
