HP Enterprise's Analytics Strategy: Solve Everyday Problems

Dreamforce 2015: 8 Ways Analytics Changes Business

On Tuesday HP announced major updates to IT service and application management platforms HP Propel and HP Service Anywhere, promising IT administrators a better way to manage the complexity and costs that have grown out of hybrid cloud environments and sprawling catalogs of applications.

But the bigger story behind today's announcement and other recent HP software news is how HP is leveraging its investments in analytics to help customers derive more value from both the software and the data. Instead of leaving big data cloistered -- accessible only to those with the keys to the data warehouse -- the idea is to bring the insights pulled from the data directly into the applications that people use to do their jobs every day.

Robert Youngjohns, executive vice president and general manager of HP Software, laid out the strategy during the HP Big Data conference in Boston in August.

[Looking for more on HP? Read HP Unveils New Enterprise Security Products At HP Protect 2015.]

"This is about solving the everyday problems," he said during his keynote address there. "Whether it's having better security, better operations management with your enterprise, better control of stock levels, better interactions with your customers. It's about applying analytics to every one of those problems in a very pragmatic way."

Leveraging Analytics

That's just what HP is doing with HP Service Anywhere. The IT management, help desk, and ticketing software leverages HP's big data tools, collectively called HP Haven, to identify larger IT issues faster. Technicians can see if there's a spike in particular issues being reported by users, for instance. That means big problems can be identified and fixed faster.

HP is using Haven as an underlying engine for all of the software applications it offers to customers.

Haven Explained

What is Haven? It's actually a loose acronym for all the components that underlie HP's big data infrastructure, and it's been years in the making. H stands for Hadoop. A stands for Autonomy (and the Autonomy IDOL tool), which provides analysis of unstructured data, including text, video, and more. V stands for HP Vertica, the company's structured data analysis platform. E is for Enterprise Security Products, and N is for the n (or infinite) number of applications that can leverage the big data engine.

HP gained many of these capabilities via acquisitions over the past several years. Many of these offerings, for instance HP Vertica, are also still available as individual products to HP's enterprise customers who want to buy them separately. But HP has also assembled this selection of analytics tools for big data to be a differentiator in its own its own software and service offerings, such as the HP Propel and HP Service Anywhere updates announced today.

Those updates extended the software's capabilities to gain insights from unstructured data. For instance, IT administrators can gain insights into the comments users make in internal forums or even social media. Haven is programmed to analyze the tone and sentiment of those comments and make them part of the overall analysis available to organizations.

Applying Analytics to Security

Today's announcements from HP's IT Operations Management group are only the most recent examples of how the company is hooking its customer-facing product portfolios into the Haven big data engine to leverage the practical value of big data for customers. Earlier this month at the HP Protect conference the company announced analytics enhancements to its enterprise security lineup including HP DNS Malware Analytics, a solution designed to identify infected hosts by inspecting an enterprise's DNS traffic; HP Fortify scan analytics, a machine-learning technology that applies analytics to application security scan results; and HP User Behavior Analytics designed to identify malicious or negligent users and attacks against user accounts.

Enterprise organizations can expect to see HP leverage more of its Haven big data platform and strategy in future application updates, too. HP Discover, a customer conference in London in December could provide the backdrop for a new set of announcements from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE).