Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has brought its Haven OnDemand machine learning-as-a-service to commercial availability after a beta program that began in December 2014. Haven OnDemand is built on technology gained through the acquisition of Autonomy, and runs on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.
Here are the key details of Haven OnDemand, from HPE's press announcement Thursday:
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.
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.
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.
Haven OnDemand offers a wide range of capabilities, including text analysis, format conversion, enterprise search, image recognition, face detection, graph analysis, and speech recognition and transcription.
HPE managed to generate a healthy developer community around Haven OnDemand during the beta period, with hundreds of applications created using the service, according to the announcement:
* 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.
* RingDNA – an enterprise provider of advanced inside sales is using HPE Haven OnDemand machine learning APIs to power part of their “conversation analytics” capabilities. H
* 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.
Analysis: Haven OnDemand Marks An Important Milestone for HPE
Haven OnDemand is arguably the most significant software release for HPE since Hewlett-Packard split itself in two last year. It could also over time wring significant value out of Autonomy, for which HP infamously took an $8.8 billion writedown on following alleged accounting improprietaries at the vendor before the sale went through.
It makes practical sense for HP to host Haven OnDemand on Azure, given the companies' long-standing partnership and the fact that HP shuttered its own Helion public cloud. Also, as InfoWorld's Serdar Yelgulap notes, Microsoft already offers its own machine learning services on Azure, which have drawn a healthy audience that might find interest in also using Haven OnDemand.
Now it's time to see what sort of impact Haven OnDemand can make.
"It is good to see HPE evolving into more of a software vendor," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Offering Haven on Azure is a good move to allow HPE to put more investment into the software tools itself. It now has to show value for developers who want to build next-generation applications with HPE's software platform and tools."
Haven OnDemand's analytical capabilities "are quite broad and deep, and they’re likely to see renewed interest and relevance as cloud services on Azure," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Doug Henschen. While Microsoft offers its own portfolio of machine learning services on Azure, "it has been true to Satya Nadella’s open ethos, inviting partners like HP Enterprise, with Haven, Dell, with Statistica analytics, and others onto its cloud platform. Microsoft is an old HP friend and partner, so it was a natural first step," he adds.
Meanwhile, "it will be interesting to see how HPE evolves and expands its services offerings in the cloud, either by adding more analytical capabilities or by adding more cloud options," Henschen says. "The Vertica OnDemand cloud database offering presents competition to both Microsoft and Amazon, so we’ll see just how open big public cloud providers are to working with HPE."
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