HP Enterprise: Is Haven Autonomy IDOL after a Project Runway Touch Up?
March 16, 2016
Short honk: I read “HPE Launches Machine-Learning-As-a-Service on Microsoft Azure.” The hook for me was the pricing for a new cloud search and content processing service. I did not understand the approach; for example, what the heck is an “API unit”?
But what caused me to jot down this note was this list of HPE Haven OnDemand functions. Here’s the list I circled:
- Advanced Text Analysis, which pulls concepts and sentiment from text.
- Format conversion, which converts data wherever it lives.
- Search tools across on-premises or cloud data.
- Image recognition and face detection.
- Knowledge graph analysis.
- Pattern and speech recognition.
Based on my sketchy knowledge about Autonomy IDOL, this list seems to be a summary of Autonomy’s integrated data operating features. Most of these were added to the IDOL platform in the years before HP paid $11 billion for the 1998 system which, to be fair, had been upgraded in the intervening years.
The list also reminded me of some of the functions I associated with “augmented intelligence,” a niche currently occupied by outfits like Palantir and IBM i2.
In terms of pricing, the Palantir Hobbits charge for a license, training, support, and some other goodies. But the pricing is not variable. The IBM i2 folks deliver a collection of options and each option has a price tag.
HPE’s pricing is a bit of a mystery. How many API units fit on the head of Big Data project? Whittling down that $11 billion investment suggests that the API units may be more expensive than the monthly fees suggest; for example, the introductory offer offers 50,000 API units and 15 Resource Units for [the] first three months for all paid plans.” What’s a “Resource Unit”?
The write up raises more questions than it answers in my opinion. I wonder how Autonomy IDOL will look in fall fashions?
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2016
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