HPE Integrates BlueData to Accelerate AI and Data-Driven

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP announced an integrated offering that combines the BlueData software platform with Apollo systems and Pointnext services, to provide customers with a solution for AI and data-driven business innovation.

This announcement builds on the company’s acquisition of BlueData in November 2018, and represents an important milestone in the company’s ongoing strategy for the AI and analytics market. BlueData is available as a standalone HPE software solution, and customers can continue to run BlueData software on any infrastructure.

With BlueData, the firm offers customers an as-a-service experience for artificial AI/ML and analytics running on multi-vendor infrastructure and public cloud services – leveraging the portability of containers across on-premises, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. The result is faster deployments down from months, to minutes, with the agility and flexibility that data science teams need to deliver business value.

Enterprise adoption of AI is accelerating rapidly. The number of enterprises implementing AI grew 270% in the past 4 years, according to Gartner Inc.’s recent 2019 CIO Survey ⁽¹⁾. However, organizations face many challenges in executing a successful AI strategy, including deployment complexity for distributed AI and analytics, as well as the shortage of skilled data scientists and AI/ML developers.

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The container-based BlueData software platform provides customers with one-click automated deployment for their AI and analytics tools of choice – and enables enterprise-grade security, scalability and performance. Data science teams and AI/ML developers can focus on what they do best, with productivity and efficiency. These teams can rapidly build models and develop data pipelines to drive business innovation – without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

“To stay a step ahead of the competition, enterprise organizations in every industry are embarking on AI-enabled and data-driven digital transformation initiatives,” said Milan Shetti, SVP and GM, storage, HPE. “Together, HPE and BlueData will make it easier, faster, and more cost-effective for these customers to deploy distributed AI, machine learning, and analytics – whether on-premises, in the public cloud, or in a hybrid architecture. It’s a game-changer.”

The combination of BlueData with Pointnext services and Apollo infrastructure is for enterprises with large-scale initiatives underway for AI/ML and analytics, particularly for those with an on-premises or hybrid cloud deployment. This includes existing the company’s customers in financial services, life sciences, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and other industries. Example use cases range from fraud detection and credit risk analysis, to genomics research and precision medicine, to improved customer experience, and more.

“As a healthcare company, we have vast amounts of data, but it’s been difficult for data science teams to get access to that data and operationalize their analytics and machine learning pipelines,” said Ramesh Thyagarajan, executive director, The Advisory Board/Optum, Inc. “BlueData has helped us to address these challenges, and their containerized solution has delivered faster time-to-insights, reduced our costs, and freed up our staff to innovate. It’s paying big dividends for our organization, and we look forward to continuing our journey together.”

Customers can leverage following capabilities and services
from HPE and BlueData to accelerate AI initiatives:

BlueData software subscriptions can be ordered together with Apollo server and storage infrastructure. Bundled solutions with BlueData and HPE infrastructure will be made available in a variety of different configurations.
Pointnext services offerings are available for BlueData, building on the AI/ML and big data analytics expertise and use case deployments from Pointnext. These services help to streamline the software implementation and ongoing support operations, enabling success and faster time-to-value for AI and data-driven initiatives.
BlueData team is developing innovations for the use of Kubernetes in large-scale AI and analytics deployments, with ongoing contributions to the Kubernetes open source community.
HPE reference configuration is available, providing guidance and best practices for deploying BlueData software on the Elastic Platform for Analytics (EPA), a modular infrastructure foundation for scalable multi-tenant deployments with building blocks from HPE for compute, storage and networking.
The company plans to deliver BlueData-based reference architectures for a variety of different AI/ML and analytics use cases and ecosystem tools, including Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Cloudera, H2O, and TensorFlow. These reference architectures include testing and validation from HPE engineering to determine the workload-optimized configuration for high performance and greater efficiency.

Availability:
Standalone software subscriptions and bundled offerings with Apollo hardware, together with Pointnext deployment services and customer support, are available in the US, UK, Germany, France and Singapore.

Additional ressources:
BlueData software platform
Insights into the impact for customers: HPE and BlueData: Accelerating Time-to-Value with AI and Analytics
Strategy for HPE and BlueData: A New Hybrid IT Vision for AI / ML and Analytics in the Enterprise
Blog on Pointnext Services: Kick AI and Big Data into High Gear with HPE BlueData EPIC and New HPE Pointnext Services