HPE has greatly broadened the open source tools for Ezmeral it provides customers and partners, which have largely come into the company through acquisitions.

HPE is announcing that their HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software has been upgraded to improve the access it provides across multiple data sources, including hybrid, edge, colocation, on-premises, and public cloud environments. The software is available for the first time as a SaaS offering, with a new intuitive user interface, and with a broader range of both open source and proprietary tools.

Ezmeral is an offering which HPE has had on the market for four years.

“It didn’t replace anything,” said Matt Maccaux, global field CTO for HPE Ezmeral. “It was created through a series of acquisitions, both open source and analytics. “It is a unique standalone offering which complements the breadth of the portfolio. The industry has been looking to companies like DataBricks, Snowflake, and [AWS] SageMaker for this. However, many CIOs have told us that while these are great for prototyping, they are not so good for running at scale. These customers need predictability and security, and they don’t want to move a lot of data around. We are more able to deliver that.”

Ezmeral, which runs on top of GreenLake, has been regularly enhanced, particularly through technology that comes from additional mergers and acquisitions.

“For example, we just acquired QFlow after it was spun out from Google,” Maccaux said. HPE also hired most of the team at Arrikto, which advances Kubeflow, the top MLOps open-source tool.

What HPE is announcing now is significant advances to the hybrid multi-cloud data and analytics platform of Ezmeral Software, taking advantage of the new analytics and AI/ML insights that have been added.

“We have gone through some iterations,” Maccaux stated. “What we had done in the best was very Kubernetes-centric. We provided customers with open source Kubernetes. However, as customers got more experienced, many of them came back and told us that they don’t want to do Kubernetes management. So now we  are hiding that complexity under the covers. We have also added new open source tooling, such as Qflow, Lflow, Airflow, and Ray. We provide these open source components so that we can provide additional support without being proprietary, if that’s what the customer wants. Delivering open source in a hybrid environment means that the customer is not locked in. They can run it anywhere.”

Ezmeral has also been strengthened by new proprietary options. The primary new connectors and data sources include Snowflake, MySQL, DeltaLake, Teradata and Oracle.

HPE Ezmeral is also refocusing on its Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software, terming it a comprehensive new offering for data engineering, data science and data analytics delivered as a SaaS and self-service experience. It lets customers design data pipelines, develop, deploy and monitor models and visualize data with the expanded tools now available. They can also optimize workload placement according to performance, data locality, sovereignty, costs and compliance.

Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software is not actually a brand new product, but it has been sufficiently revamped to make HPE’s case that it is substantially new.

“The unified analytics that we had been selling since 2020-201 was more of a data lake for SPARQ and SQL,” Maccaux said. “We revisited it and that’s where we went to open source tools and resources.

“There’s a whole new consumption aspect to it now,” he added. “We are selling it as a service, and not just term licensing, so the customer can start small with predictive growth.”

Maccaux also said that the unified analytics also enhances Ezmeral’s hybrid ability to be deployable across the edge, colocation, on-premises, and public cloud environments.

“The data fabric now allows organizations to better connect the cloud, edge and private environments, because of the new connective tissue and unified analytics,” he indicated.

Maccaux stressed that all this new flexibility is a good thing for the HPE channel.

“This is a platform for our channel partners to bring in all these additional other components,” he said. “HPE has some limited vertical offerings in the market,  through ISV partners. We are not being overly prescriptive. We are the most open platform on the market for ISVs to innovate in the channel channel. This flexibility and openness opens up new areas of opportunity unlike anything in the marketplace.

No one else provides the solutions that are pure 100% open source that can deployed be deployed cloud, edge, and private,” Maccaux added. “We believe this value proposition of meeting customers where they are is a significant competitive advantage.”

HPE Ezmeral Data Fabric Software and HPE Ezmeral Unified Analytics Software are available now as a SaaS offering.