HP Extends Big Data Reach into Predictive Analytics

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Hewlett-Packard this week at the Strata + Hadoop 2015 conference extended the reach of its Big Data platform to encompass a free, open source predictive analytics toolset that is compatible with SQL.

HP Haven Predictive Analytics makes predictive analytics capabilities available to organizations via a standard set of SQL interfaces used to access data stored in the HP Vertica database. It is based on an open source distributed implementation of the R programming language developed by HP Labs that runs on top of the Big Data platform that HP created using the HP Vertica columnar database and Hadoop.

While Haven has been widely used to modernize traditional analytics applications, Jeff Veis, vice president of marketing for Big Data software at HP, says HP Haven Predictive Analytics is designed to make advanced analytics capabilities available to organizations without necessarily requiring them to master a new programming language.

Obviously, by making HP Haven Predictive Analytics available for free, HP is trying to drive adoption of the Haven platform. But at the same time, HP is also helping to democratize predictive analytics by including algorithms based on the R programming language, which organizations can instantly deploy.

In general, Big Data is proving to be a frustrating experience because too many data scientists are spending most of their time tackling plumbing issues versus deriving actionable insights from Big Data. Perhaps by giving away more of the plumbing needed to set up a predictive analytics application in the first place, the data being collected by organizations might actually have meaningful business value.