HPE is betting big on AI to fuel your apps and analytics

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has made no secret of its desire to push further into big data, and on Tuesday it announced two key new offerings: HPE Haven OnDemand Combinations, an extension of the "machine learning as a service" platform it released earlier this year, and Vertica 8, a major new update to its analytics software.

Launched in March, HPE's Haven OnDemand cloud platform offers machine learning APIs (application programming interfaces) and services designed to help developers and businesses build data-rich applications.

The platform now has 70 artificial intelligence APIs and more than 18,000 users, and HPE is extending it to make development easier.

Haven OnDemand Combinations, a cloud service built on top of OnDemand, provides a catalogue of pre-built and customizable machine learning APIs and a drag-and-drop interface for mixing and matching them.

Developers can string together APIs and copy and paste the code directly into their development projects, HPE said. Among the benefits is that complex API combinations can be reduced to a single API call, thereby improving data throughput.

Now available as a preview by request in the Haven OnDemand Marketplace, the software is delivered globally on Microsoft Azure.

A developer version includes free preview and prototyping, while the commercial release also includes capabilities such as enterprise-grade service level assurance.

Also on Tuesday, HPE announced the next release of its Vertica analytics software. Code-named "Frontloader," Vertica 8 introduces a unified architecture and new in-database analytics capabilities.

Companies can use HPE Vertica 8 on data residing on premises, in private and public clouds, and in Hadoop data lakes. With its in-database machine learning capabilities, they can natively create and deploy R-based machine learning models directly within the software.

Improvements to data movement and orchestration let users load data as much as 700 percent faster than before, HPE said.

Those gains are possible for hundreds of thousands of columns. Vertica 8 also makes it easier to load data from Amazon S3 and includes comprehensive visual monitoring of Apache Kafka data streams.

Vertica 8 is now optimized for Microsoft Azure and AWS. Support for Amazon's cloud has been expanded with AWS CloudWatch integration, tighter security, and more.

Both Haven OnDemand Combinations and Vertica 8 will be generally available during the fourth quarter of HPE’s fiscal 2016, which ends Oct. 31.

Earlier this month, HPE announced that it's buying SGI in a $275 million deal that it hopes will propel its big-data analytics efforts further.