Database maker Vertica Systems is moving its technology to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure, hoping to score customers who want a hosted, pay-as-you-go model for data warehousing and business intelligence, the company announced Monday.

Vertica's database organizes data by columns, as opposed to rows. The company and others that make columnar databases, such as Sybase and ParAccel, contend the approach is faster and better for business intelligence-related queries because only the desired columns -- such as a customer's name or location -- can be read without having to parse through an entire table, saving bandwidth.

The company also sells the database for on-premises use and in appliance form.

It sees a market for the on-demand offering due to a number of scenarios. For example, a company might want to conduct a business intelligence project that will only last a fixed period of time, such as revising its pricing based on competitive and market data, said Andy Ellicott, senior director of marketing.

Hedge funds, which test their trading algorithms against large sets of historical stock market data, are another potential use case, because while such entities manage vast amounts of money, they seek to maintain the lowest possible overhead, which a cloud-based approach can provide, he said.

It is also hoping to sell to software-as-a-service companies that focus on analytics.

One such vendor, Sonian, has been beta-testing the on-demand version.

"Everything is working out really well," said Sonian's chief technology officer, Greg Arnette. "We don't want to be in the plumbing business any more, managing pipes and [storage area networks]. We don't have to become experts on the Vertica database," he added.

The company started out as a hosted e-mail archiving provider, but is working on a service that will provide analysis of a company's stored content.

Sonian is still handling the task of loading data into Vertica, "but they're providing the expertise on configuring the database, optimizing it, that kind of stuff," he said.

Vertica's move is "very interesting" and positions it "as one of the front-runners in the race to bring data warehousing into the cloud," said Forrester analyst James Kobielus in an e-mail message on Friday.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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