HP Launches Big Data as a Service Offering

Big DataHewlett-Packard Co. this week rolled out cloud-based analytics as-a-service, giving partners a new option for delivering Big Data capabilities in an on-demand model that obviates large capital investments.

HP’s new Big Data Discovery Experience as a Service is built on the HP HAVEn Big Data analytics platform and delivered by HP Enterprise Services. Available services include analysis of customer intelligence, supply chain and operations, and sensor data. Big Data Discovery Experience as a Service aims to help end users in verticals like media, retail, transportation and government better leverage their data to increase sales, improve supply chain performance, detect fraud and waste, and root out security risks.

The underlying Hadoop-capable HP HAVEn platform combines HP Autonomy IDOL, HP Vertica Analytics Platform, HP ArcSight Security Event Manager and HP ArcSight Logger. The solution can work with large and complex sets of structured and unstructured data including image, audio, text and machine-generated information.

“Harnessing the value of information is a top priority for our clients and a Big Data solution is a significant investment of time and money for any organization, regardless of industry,” said Dragan Rakovich, chief technologist for information management and analytics at HP Enterprise Services.  Rakovich said his group leveraged “HP HAVEn’s unified approach to Big Data to provide a low-risk, simplified and accelerated entry path to addressing key client business problems.”

Offerings like HP’s Big Data Discovery Experience come at an opportune time for partners increasingly eager for Big Data to find its raison d’être and anxious to find a suitable way to serve the market with an on-demand, services-based solution.

According to new research data from Gartner Inc., Big Data investments will continue to rise through the end of this year and beyond with 64 percent of organizations investing or planning to invest in the technology, up from 58 percent last year. Thirty percent have already invested in Big Data, while 19 percent plan to invest within the next year and 15 percent plan to buy in within two years.

While the figures are encouraging, the Big Data space remains nascent for most with just 8 percent of the 720 Gartner Research Circle members surveyed saying they’d actually deployed high-end analytics tools in their organizations.

Every vertical industry again shows Big Data investment and planned investment, the survey found.

“The hype around Big Data continues to drive increased investment and attention, but there is real substance behind the hype,” said Lisa Kart, research director at Gartner. “Our survey underlines the fact that organizations across industries and geographies see ‘opportunity’ and real business value rather than the ‘smoke and mirrors’ with which hypes usually come.”