HP pairs Autonomy and Vertica software

IDG News Service - Hewlett-Packard is quickly putting to use its recent acquisitions of Autonomy and Vertica, integrating the software from these companies into a single software package, called the HP Next Generation Information Platform.

Customers will be available to use the combined offering, which will be made available at the end of January, to search and analyze both structured and unstructured data, said June Manley, who is HP's director of information optimization business solutions.

The Vertica Analytics Platform is a data warehouse software for storing and analyzing structured data, or data that has been stored in a relational database. Autonomy's IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Layer) server can index unstructured data within an enterprise, providing users with a search-based interface.

HP completed its purchase of Autonomy in October, and purchased Vertica in March.

HP's Autonomy unit has updated IDOL so that it includes a set of hooks that would allow it to be easily integrated with Vertica, said HP Autonomy chief marketing officer Nicole Eagan. IDOL version 10, available Dec. 1, will offer users the ability to work with structured data that is being held in the Vertica platform, she said.

"Autonomy's strength has been in text, audio, and video, while Vertica brings more of the columnar database processing and analytics," Eagan said.

The unified interface could be handy for synthesizing in a single workflow both structured and unstructured data, which are typically dealt with by separate systems within an enterprise, Eagan said.

For instance, data culled from social media sites such as Twitter, which is typically captured as unstructured data, could be explored using Vertica's social graphing functionality and projective analytics. The package could also combine click-stream analytics captured in Vertica with sentiment analysis data captured in Autonomy.

Video or audio, both of which IDOL can ingest, could be paired with related sensor data or historical data stored in Vertica for real-time intelligent monitoring. As an example, a bank could monitor a phone call with a customer requesting credit, which can be parsed through Autonomy. "If during that call, the caller said something to cause the mortgage provider or bank to be worried about a credit risk, they might want to run that against a Vertica credit risk analyzer in real time," Eagan said.

The paired offering could also provide a single interface for working with both IDOL and Vertica data. Ovum enterprise software analyst Tony Baer has stated that the Autonomy and Vertica software would be a good fit for each other, because the Autonomy software could provide a superior user-facing front-end for the Vertica software.

Beyond the HP Next Generation Information Platform, HP may also combine IDOL and Vertica for other analytic packages, Eagan said. "This is a great starting-off point. With things like big data and social media being as hot as they are, you will see different things evolve," she said.

In addition to IDOL 10, HP also made other announcements around its family of products for information management. It revealed the newest version of its deduplication appliance, the HP B6200 StoreOnce Backup System, which can scan material and erase duplicate copies at a speed of 28TB per hour. It expanded its IT Performance suite with additional reporting metrics. The company also introduced a set of services for helping customers install Vertica, called HP Advanced Information Services for Vertica.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com