Zynga, The promoter of Facebook | Zynga and Facebook | Facebook Game Provider | Vertica, the analytics behind Zynga

FarmVille-maker Zynga is a real business with $300+ million revenues that is beginning to realize it depends too much Facebook for its users.
But where can it go?
Facebook requires Zynga to use Facebook Credits and, in the process, charges Zynga 30% for every transaction.
Facebook also limits the ways in which Zynga can contact its users, and this forces Zynga to buy more Facebook ads.
There's also rumors that Facebook wants Zynga to promise it won't build games for other social networks.
Zynga – and the bankers who want to take it to an IPO someday – obviously hate all this. So it's no surprise to hear Zynga VP Mark Skaggs telling IndustryGamers that "Facebook’s not always going to be the answer."
Mark is optimistic that Zynga will soon have an alternative to Facebook.
He said, "There’s other folks that’ll come. Just like in the console business, there were more console makers that came up."
But Mark doesn't say who those alternatives to Facebook will be. We noodled it for a bit and came up with four possibilities:
Maybe Zynga will try launching some games on Twitter. Lead Twitter investor Fred Wilson wrote a post last month encouraging Twitter developers to get into social gaming. Fred is also a Zynga investor.
Another possibility is MySpace. Zynga-rival Playdom actually gets more users from MySpace than it does Facebook. MySpace is currently undergoing a redesign, with one goal being to become more game-friendly.
Zynga could build more games for the iPad and iPhone. Zynga has some games for the iPhone, but they aren't a huge company focus. It doesn't have any iPad games yet, but it was on stage at the announcement of Kleiner Perkin's iPad Fund.
Zynga could try to launch its own destination site. Rumor is Zynga plans to launch something called Zynga Live.com as its own gamers network.

So you want to buy a tractor? Build a house? Scrabble? So do the more than 62 million other gamers who play Farmville daily. That's why keeping its communities humming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and responding to issues in real-time is no game for Zynga. To get the job done, the company turned to Vertica, which is now owned by HP. Says Ken Rudin, VP of Analytcs at Zynga: "With over 40 million players, 3TB of new data a day and 230 nodes spread across two clusters, Zynga's columnar data warehouse from Vertica is no analytical windup toy."

Jacquelyn Gavron is a Brooklyn, NY-based freelancer who specializes in usability and content for mobile and online apps. Previously, she was Content Manager for Citi Mobile and Executive Editor at PC Magazine. She can be reached at jgavron.scribe4hire@gmail.com.

That's for sure. The moment data hits Vertica, Rudin's team can observe what's going on in a game, then optimize the experience as fast as you can say Farmville. If performance dips during spikes in usage, analysts can add nodes on-the-fly-- a feature known as "elastic computing"--and remove them just as quickly when activity levels out.

Squeezing BIG Data

As Rudin mentioned, unlike traditional RDBMS systems, Vertica stores data in columns instead of rows. (So do other data warehouses including AsterData and ParAccel).
Data stored in columns can be more tightly compressed - 10:1 in the case of Vertica. "We can reduce 10 terabytes of data to 1 terabyte," says Mingsheng Hong, Technical Marketing Specialist at Vertica. This can be critical as the size of data sets shifts from terabyte to petabytes.
In addition, Vertica can operate on this compressed data, which improves performance by reducing CPU, memory and disk I/O at processing time, according to the company's web site. Traditional RDBMS systems, in turn, can't work with compressed data--it's got to be extracted first.

Who Would Guess?

Hong also claims that Vertica's performance is 50x to 100x faster than traditional RDBMS systems. Michael Relich, CIO of Guess Inc., agrees.

"We have 520 stores and buyers go there to check inventory using their iPads," says Relich. "Batch loads took six to seven hours with Oracle, and data wasn't ready for buyers in the morning."

"We looked at a competitive hardware solution but were attracted by commodity (x86) hardware approach," adds Relich. "Queries that took hours were reduced to minutes. Those that took minutes were reduce to seconds." As a result, "Guess will be rolling out Vertica to its South Korean operations, says Relich.

Note: Vertica offers an SDK to write custom methods for analyzing data directly in its database.