Former Vertica CEO Chris Lynch Leaves HP

acquired the business intelligence vendor

Lynch's departure, first reported by SiliconAngle.com, comes as HP is ramping up its fledgling Information Management division, which consists of Vertica and Autonomy, the U.K.-based software vendor HP acquired last August for $10.3 billion.

Also known as Big Data, information management refers to technology that harnesses the massive amount of data that organizations generate and makes it usable for practical and strategic purposes.

Lynch is well known in Big Data circles, and according to SiliconAngle.com -- which described his departure as "a big loss" for HP -- he is planning to shift his attentions to supporting Boston-area Big Data startups.

Vertica's real-time analytics platform can handle large volumes of data in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Autonomy's core technology, called Idol, allows computers to understand unstructured, or 'human friendly' information -- i.e. e-mails, Twitter posts, video and audio.

HP has been using Vertica's technology in its business intelligence appliances since 2007, when it teamed up with Vertica and Red Hat to distribute pre-configured data analysis appliances built on HP BladeSystem c3000 servers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Lynch, who joined Vertica as CEO in 2010, was previously senior vice president of data solutions at F5 Networks. He joined F5 in its 2007 acquisition of storage startup Acopia Networks, where he was CEO.

Prior to that, Lynch was vice president of worldwide content delivery networking sales at Cisco Systems, and he has also held roles at Lucent and ArrowPoint Communications.