HP has announced several new products and services around its Big Data offerings, including a new release of HP Vertica. The most interesting of the lot, however, is likely the new HP Haven Startup Accelerator program.
The program is designed to provide early-stage companies with fast, affordable access to HP Big Data and Application Delivery Management software and services.
“The Startup Accelerator Program is aimed at early stage developers,” said Chris Selland, Vice-President of Business Development, HP Software, Big Data. “For a long time, we have had free access to a version of our Vertica product, up to 1 TB, and for non-commercial use, and we also offer IDOL on demand as a free Web service. Early stage developers often need more help, however, and that’s what the program is for. It’s to help early stage companies who may need more product than the free platforms, or the support they don’t have.”
The free community versions of Vertica and Idol have had their capacity expanded, but Selland believes the new premium version, which he said is not free, but is relatively inexpensive, will appeal to many.
“It’s a tier above the free version, designed to take the price equation off the table,” he said.
Selland said the intent is to make the program available to as broad a group of developers as possible.
“There are some parameters around eligibility designed to make it focus on early stage developers with newer, smaller companies,” he said. “The company has to have less than 50 employees, be less than five years old, have less than 10 million dollars in both revenue and funding, and not be a subsidiary of another company.”
HP also announced, “Excavator,” HP’s code name for the new Version of their HP Vertica SQL database.
“Excavator has been really optimized for the Internet of Things,” Selland said. “One big element of the announcement is the offering of native support for the Apache Kafka open source distributed messaging system, as well as Hadoop.” This will let organizations quickly ingest and analyze high-speed streaming data, including the Internet of Things, in near real-time. It also will let organizations collect and index large log file data sets generated by systems and business applications, which has a valuable security utility. It makes it possible to identify and predict application failures and cyber-attacks quickly, as well as investigate authorized and unauthorized access.
While it is not part of this release, HP announced a future commitment to integrate Vertica with the Apache Spark cluster computing framework. This will enable accelerated data transfer between Vertica and Spark, to let organizations take full advantage of their Spark-based deployments.
Finally, HP also announced an extension of the HP Haven Big Data platform with an Apps Framework to accelerate solution development.
“This is a new packaging of Haven technologies, Vertica, IDOL, and predictive analytics, with the ability to have prebuilt solutions for specific use cases in a building block approach,” Selland said. It includes quick-start visualization, syndicated data feeds, open on-premise and cloud-based APIs.
“It is designed to combine different discrete products to create a building block template to build most of the solution – about 80 per cent – with the customer the last mile,” Selland said.
It also opens up opportunities for both HP Professional Services and HP partners to deliver that full solution, with voice of customer, smart cities, and fraud detection being among the range of solutions.
Availability of the new HP Haven Big Data offerings and services is scheduled for fall of 2015.
