The Vertica acquisition was "interesting," but HP doesn't have enough of an identity as a provider of analytic software, Baum said. "It's not like, here's a database, and I'm going to bundle this database with my hardware, and here's an appliance. It's just not that simple."

While Netezza competes with Oracle "day in and day out," Exadata "does work well for some workloads but not the analytic workloads we target," he said.

"But that said, they are a competitive force to be reckoned with, there is no doubt about it, which is one of the great advantages we have now as part of IBM," Baum added. "We just have a lot more muscle behind us."

The IDG News Service