HP announces new machine learning as a service offering

Technology major Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) today announced the commercial launch of Haven OnDemand, a cloud platform that provides advanced machine learning application programme interfaces and services that enable developers, startups and enterprises to build data-rich mobile and enterprise applications.

The company also announced a new version of Idol analytics platform, which applies data analytics and machine learning for organisations to automate and supplement a vast array of manual-based tasks such as trend analysis and video surveillance.

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"Haven OnDemand democratises big data by bringing power of machine learning, traditionally reserved for high-end, highly trained data scientists, to the mainstream developer community," HPE Vice President for big data platform for Asia Pacific and Japan Darren Ong told reporters here today.

"Now, anyone can leverage our easy to use cloud-based service to harness the rich variety of data available to build applications that produce new insights, differentiate businesses, delight customers and deliver a competitive advantage," he added.

The products were unveiled at the HPE Advanced Analytics World Tour 2016 here today.

The product has over 12,750 developers who generate millions of API calls a week and have provided feedback to improve and refine the offering.

The company is offering a flexible approach that starts as a freemium service, enabling development and testing for free and extends to a usage and SLA-based commercial pricing model for enterprise class delivery to support production deployments.

Some of the capabilities offered by the new offering are advanced text analysis, format conversion, image recognition and face detection, knowledge graph analysis and speech recognition, among others he said.

Delivered as a service on Microsoft Azure, the offering provides over 60 application programme interfaces or APIs and services that deliver deep learning analytics on a wide range of data, including texts, audio, images, social, web and video.

The new offering combines context-based analytics and visualisation capabilities to empower knowledge workers and help companies take a data-driven approach to every process, operation and customer interaction.

"Traditional databases are not designed to analyse human information and so lack the key capabilities necessary to effectively and reliably understand unstructured data. With the addition of next generation artificial intelligence, neural networks and machine learning-based capabilities, we now enable organisations to harness 100 per cent of their data," Ong said.

New Idol 11 empowers businesses to perform self service analytics and shortens time to insight with intuitive, easy to use visualisation functionality. It also automatically discovers relationships between entities including people, places and companies, to reveal insightful linkages and shared traits.