Big data and the analytics it fuels is becoming increasingly important to line of business users from marketing to sales, allowing them to make quicker decisions with better information. A series of new announcements from Hewlett-Packard Co. aims to help companies go big with big data.
HP made a series of announcements this week at its Big Data Conference in Boston. They included a new edition of the HP Vertica big data analytics appliance with support for the Internet of Things (IoT), new support for open source technologies including optimized Hadoop performance, and the HP Haven Startup Accelerator Program to help bring big data analytics down market to be more accessible to smaller businesses.
The vendor said its big data strategy is focuses around helping organizations of all sizes harness data of all types, including new forms of data such as that generated by IoT devices, while leveraging new open source products and providing new tools to both business users and developers.
“Developers are the new heroes of the idea economy,” said Colin Mahony, senior vice-president and general manager for HP Big Data Software, in a statement. “HP is uniquely positioned to help businesses and developers thrive in this new world. Through our Haven and Haven OnDemand platforms, we are empowering these heroes to transform their business through data, by allowing them to harness the value of all forms of information, rapidly connect and apply open source, and quickly access the tools they need to build winning businesses.”
Excavator is the code name for the new version of Vertica, HP’s SQL database. The new version includes data streaming analytics with support for the Apache Kafka open source distributed messaging system. HP says this will allow organizations to ingest and analyze high speed streaming data from the IoT and other sources in near real time, delivering actionable business intelligence to use cases such as healthcare monitoring and fraud detection. Excavator will also help organizations quickly collect and index large log file data sets generated by systems and business applications, which will help the IT team predict failures and isolate security breaches.
On the open source front, HP has improved the Hadoop support in Verica, adding support for popular formats such as ORC and Parquet. A new high-performance access layer sees SQL queries run five times faster. Also new is native integration with Apache Spark, which will allow for accelerated data transfer between Vertical and Spark.
And to help take big data analytics down market, the vendor has launched the HP Haven Startup Accelerator. The program is designed to allow developers and ecosystem partners to make HP’s big data solutions available to early-stage companies. In the form of differentiated partner-created applications. The program includes free usage of the community versions of HP Idol and HP Vertica with expanded capacity, premium versions of each with reduces pricing, an a number of HP Application Delivery Management tools.
The Haven solutions will be available this fall.