Vector wise is a new entrant in the analytical database marketplace whose technology comes straight from innovations in the database research community in the past years. The product has since made waves due to its excellent performance in analytical customer workloads as well as benchmarks. We describe the history of Vector wise, as well as its basic architecture and the experiences in turning a technology developed in an academic context into a commercial-grade product. Finally, we turn our attention to recent performance results, most notably on the TPC-H benchmark at various sizes.