World's Top Social Gaming Companies Tap Vertica to Continuously Enhance Gaming Experiences in Real-Time

LOS ANGELES, April 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Vertica announced today at the LA Games Conference that it has emerged as the top analytics database for the world's most successful social game developers.

Gaming giants like Zynga, CrowdStar, Playdom, Mochi Media, Aurora Feint, Sibblingz and others are using the Vertica Analytic Database to improve revenue and customer retention by continuously enhancing players' gaming experience on social platforms like Facebook, MySpace and the iPhone.

The secret behind each developer's success is the ability to analyze data in ways they couldn't before, thereby gaining previously unattainable insight into players' needs, behaviors and usage patterns. The ultra-fast Vertica Analytic Database enables gaming companies to load and query massive volumes of usage data in near real time, around the clock. The technology helps developers understand how users interact with their games and respond to new features and promotions so that they can monetize elements of the game effectively. The companies say it gives them a competitive edge in a $2 billion high-stakes market that will more than triple in size by 2012 (source: ThinkEquity LLC).

For example, Zynga, the developer of social games like FarmVille, Mafia Wars and Cafe World, is using Vertica as a core part of the game development process. With more than 65 million daily active users generating massive amounts of data each day, the company is able to tap into this information in near real time to gain valuable insight such as analyzing in-game testing of new features and spotting fast-breaking usage trends.

CrowdStar, second only to Zynga with more than 10 million daily active users, is using Vertica to identify its most profitable customer demographics and develop irresistible new features for breakout games such as Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and Know-It-All. This same analytics usage holds true for Sibblingz and Aurora Feint, which are social games born of the same gaming incubator as CrowdStar. And Mochi Media, the world's largest online gaming network, runs its online gaming ad server and advertising analytics using Vertica.

"With data loaded every hour, Vertica enables Mochi Media's customers to better understand and monetize the games they develop using our platform. Because Vertica provides high-speed access to massive amounts of advertising, virtual payment and game data, our customers can slice and dice their information on demand," said Bob Ippolito, CTO of Mochi Media.

Vertica has become the de facto standard for social gaming analytics thanks to its unique columnar, MPP architecture and pioneering data compression that reduces storage requirements by as much as 90 percent, dramatically cutting hardware overhead and energy consumption so game developers can analyze larger amounts of data cost effectively. As a true columnar database it can execute queries directly on that compressed data, delivering query results orders of magnitude faster than other databases.

With this high-speed analytics capability, social gaming developers can quickly:

• innovate new ways to acquire and keep customers;
• measure the impact of feature changes on their customers' long-term engagements; and
• identify the most critical customer engagement and monetization metrics to optimize, such as user time-on-site, average revenue per user (ARPU), churn and return visitor metrics.

"Our customers realize that if they can see what drives player behavior and continuously improve the user experience in reaction to that insight, everyone benefits. Real-time analytics is the best way to guide development of enticing game content, virtual goods and promotions faster and more profitably," said Christopher Lynch, president and CEO of Vertica.

About Vertica

Vertica Systems provides a true columnar analytic database management system that delivers the fastest, most scalable and easiest way to gain business intelligence from huge volumes of data in near-real-time. Vertica has developed a modern SQL-based analytic database with an MPP architecture that runs on low-cost standard hardware. The technology enables companies to gain a competitive edge by querying enormous databases 50x-200x faster and for a lower Total Cost of Ownership than other solutions. The Vertica Analytic Database is available as software only, as a hardware-based appliance, as a virtual appliance on VMware or online as a cloud computing solution. The technology's unmatched speed, simplicity and scalability is used by more than 130 customers including JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Guess Inc., Zynga, CapitalIQ, Mozilla and Comcast. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, Mass. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.vertica.com.

SOURCE Vertica