So let’s dissect the press release in our customary style – it can be found here:
PALO ALTO, Calif., March 10, 2016 – Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced the immediate commercial availability of HPE Haven OnDemand, an innovative cloud platform that provides advanced machine learning APIs and services that enable developers, startups and enterprises to build data-rich mobile and enterprise applications.
Delivered as a service on Microsoft® Azure, HPE Haven OnDemand provides more than 60 APIs and services that deliver deep learning analytics on a wide range of data, including text, audio, image, social, web and video.
MyPOV – Sums up well what is being announced, basically Haven capabilities are being moved to the cloud, more specifically to Microsoft Azure. Not only good to see for HPE to leverage software product assets, but also good to see that the announced partnership between HPE and Microsoft has lead to real deliverables.
HPE first pioneered this effort in December 2014 with the beta launch of HPE Haven OnDemand. Today, HPE Haven OnDemand has more than 12,750 registered developers who currently generate millions of API calls per week, and have provided feedback to improve and refine the offering.
MyPOV – Good to know where the software was originally tested – likely at the time still with plans for HP Helion (now defunct). Kudos to HP to share the number of registered developers on the platform, something not all platform offerings do – but should do.
“The software industry is on the cusp of a new era of breakthroughs, driven by machine learning that will power data-driven applications across all facets of life,” said Colin Mahony (@cpmahony), Senior Vice President and General Manager, HPE Big Data, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “HPE Haven OnDemand democratizes big data by bringing the power of machine learning, traditionally reserved for high-end, highly trained data scientists, to the mainstream developer community. Now, anyone can leverage our easy to use cloud-based service to harness the rich variety of data available today to build applications that produce new insights, differentiate businesses, delight customers and deliver a competitive advantage.”
MyPOV – Good quote from Mahony focusing on what we agree is the largest drive to next generation applications – the need for BigData based applications that enable ‘true’ analytics (more here) and machine learning, running in the cloud.
HPE offers 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 HPE Haven OnDemand include:
MyPOV – Good to see the ‘try / buy’ approach with no cost at entry, but that has become quickly the de-facto standard of new developer offerings.
Advanced Text Analysis – extracts the key meaning from language by employing powerful concept extraction capabilities that go beyond traditional approaches to obtain key concepts, entities and sentiment from text sources.
Format Conversion – provides key functions to access, extract and convert information wherever it lives by supporting an extensive set of standard file formats and the ability to employ optical character recognition to extract text from an image.
HPE Haven Search OnDemand enterprise-search-as-a-service – delivers powerful cultivated search across on-premise or cloud data to deliver superior context-sensitive search results.
Image Recognition and Face Detection – enables applications to detect specific image features and code around human-centric use cases to identify the gender of an individual or key information such as a brand logo from within an image.
Knowledge Graph Analysis – automatically delivers insights and predictions related to relationships and behavioral patterns among people, places and things. These capabilities are very useful for analyzing social media and related data.
Predict and Recommend – enables developers to view patterns in business data to optimize business performance and build a set of self-learning functions that analyze, predict and alert based on structured datasets.
Speech Recognition – employs advanced neural network technology to transcribe speech to text from video or audio files with support for over 50 languages. […]
MyPOV – A powerful set of services to build next generation applications, we see interactions with the ‘real’ world around facial, image and speech recognition to be very powerful drivers for next generation applications, as the sheer data and compute demands require a new application to be created, usually on a new platform, mostly in the cloud.
Strong Momentum Spanning Startups to Global EnterprisesMyPOV – Good to see that HPE has understood the importance of communities for developer success. And Hackathons are still popular to get developers motivated and creative. But most importantly seeing real world uptake of HAVEN capabilities across startups and ISVs like RingDNA.
HPE Haven OnDemand’s easy-to-use and proven service is generating strong appeal with independent developers, startups and global enterprises. HPE has fostered a global community of developers that use HPE Haven OnDemand through an active global hackathon program and comprehensive resources, docs, tutorials, code libraries and quick-start materials. This enthusiastic developer community has provided vital feedback to help HPE optimize the offering, and has leveraged HPE Haven OnDemand to create hundreds of innovative applications. A few examples include:
Ayni – a startup that won the Hack4Europe 2015 challenge created an app for facilitating cultural exchange and foreign language education using HPE Haven OnDemand. The app uses HPE Haven OnDemand’s speech recognition API to create text transcripts of live audio streams.
Blink – a “speed dating” mobile app startup, Blink, connects people in real time, enabling live-stream video chats. The app leverages HPE Haven OnDemand face detection and image recognition APIs to enable a more human dating app experience.
RingDNA – an enterprise provider of advanced inside sales is using HPE Haven OnDemand machine learning APIs to power part of their “conversation analytics” capabilities. HPE Haven OnDemand allowed RingDNA’s developers to get up and running and explore a wide number of recipes and algorithms that were flexible and powerful enough for our enterprise customers.
Social Capital – AngelHack Global Demo Day 2015 – San Francisco city winner and startup that created an app to provide human resources social assessments using the HPE Haven OnDemand Entity Extraction and Concept Extraction APIs.
Transparent – a developer participating in the 2015 World Bank hackathon challenge created the Transparent app to understand and visualize government spending in Africa using the HPE Haven OnDemand OCR API to analyze and extract insights.
Available Globally via the Microsoft Azure Public Cloud
All HPE Haven OnDemand APIs and Services are hosted on Microsoft Azure, leveraging the Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Microsoft strategic alliance around Azure, announced in December 2015. An industry leading public cloud platform, Azure ensures that developers building applications can benefit from easy access to HPE Haven OnDemand’s APIs and services with high performance and reliability from virtually any global location.
MyPOV – Good to see the December 2015 partnership announcement between Microsoft and HPE already showing deliverables. Haven needed a public cloud to build the targeted use cases and with the old HP Helion no longer around, chosing Azure is a good platform for next generation applications. TCO is not prohibitive and data center locations are competitive compare to other IaaS options.
“Organizations have massive quantities of information that can hold insights into business transformation, but harnessing it can be challenging,” said Garth Fort, General Manager, Partner and Channel Marketing, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft. “Leveraging the high performance and scalability of Azure, HPE Haven OnDemand brings our mutual customers a compelling solution to help turn their data into value.”MyPOV – Good to see the main partner quote here. As Microsoft signs more of these partnerships it will be interesting to see and key for customers to understand the financials and costs behind these offerings, as what partners offer on Azure (here today Haven) competes with other Microsoft offerings. On the flipside we know HPE had (and has) choices in regards of IaaS partners and as a long term enterprise software player has certainly thought this through and secured favorable terms for Haven customers.
Additional InformationMyPOV – Along with a long HP tradition HPE also announces when products are ready and available – good to see.
HPE Haven OnDemand is immediately available worldwide. More information on HPE Haven OnDemand is available here. To read a blog post on HPE Haven OnDemand, click here. […]
Overall MyPOV
This is a key announcement and a milestone for the new HP for enterprises, HPE. As HPE adjusted its public cloud strategy and pivoted away from the public cloud offering at Helion, it had software assets like Haven (remember it was HAVEn at some point – see below) that need a public cloud platform. Hence the partnership with Microsoft that was announced in December of last year. And with Azure the new public cloud home for Haven is certainly an attractive platform, that the ‘new’ Microsoft is working hard (and with some surprising moves) to make even more attractive.On the concern side HPE will have to work hard to show value for using Haven. There are many other offerings for building the same breed of next generation applications on other and the same public cloud platform, so the value proposition for enterprises and developers needs to be clear. That this is possible can be seen, e.g. on the successful Heroku on AWS offering. Closer to HPE the revenue potential and growth needs to be understood – but we will see that over the next quarters.
But for now congratulations to HPE for putting Haven on Azure, good to see a forward strategy for the Haven software offering. Now it’s time to look at roadmap and commercial performance going forward.
More about HP
- News Analysis - Updates to HP Helion Portfolio - a commentary - read here
- Market Move - HP acquires Aruba - It's about Wifi - not the Caribbean - read here
- News Analysis - HP acquired Eucalyptus - Genius or Panic on Page Mill road? Read here
- News Analysis - Today's Billion in Cloud Investment is HP's and goes to Helion - read here
- A tale of two cloud GAs - Google & HP - read here
- The cloud is growing up - 3 signs from the news - read here
- To HAVEn and have not - or: HP Bundles away - read here
And more about Microsoft:
- News Analysis - Microsoft - New Hybrid Offerings Deliver Bottomless Capacity for Today's Data Explosion - read here
- News Analysis - Welcoming the Xamarin team to Microsoft - read here
- News Analysis - Microsoft announcements at Convergence Barcelona - Office365. Dynamics CRM and Power Apps
- News Analysis - Microsoft expands Azure Data Lake to unleash big data productivity - Good move - time to catch up - read here
- News Analysis - Microsoft and Salesforce Strengthen Strategic Partnership at Dreamforce 2015 - Good for joint customers - read here
- News Analyis - NetSuite announced Cloud Alliance with Microsoft - read here
- Event Report - Microsoft Build - Microsoft really wants to make developers' lives easier - read here
- First Hand with Microsoft Hololens - read here
- Event Report - Microsoft TechEd - Top 3 Enterprise takeaways - read here
- First Take - Microsoft discovers data ambience and delivers an organic approach to in memory database - read here
- Event Report - Microsoft Build - Azure grows and blossoms - enough for enterprises (yet)? Read here.
- Event Report - Microsoft Build Day 1 Keynote - Top Enterprise Takeaways - read here.
- Microsoft gets even more serious about devices - acquire Nokia - read here.
- Microsoft does not need one new CEO - but six - read here.
- Microsoft makes the cloud a platform play - Or: Azure and her 7 friends - read here.
- How the Cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
- How hard is multi-channel CRM in 2013? - Read here.
- How hard is it to install Office 365? Or: The harsh reality of customer support - read here.
Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.