HP Discover: HP, Autonomy And Vertica Units Launch Combined Big Data Push

HP announced a bunch of products and services for Big Data at its Discover 2012 conference, in which its Autonomy and Vertica businesses combine under the heading “information optimisation”.

The big pile of new stuff, announced on the second day of HP Discover 2012 in Frankfurt, Germany, included an update of HP AppSystem appliances to integrate Hadoop-based Big Data, as well as appliances for Autonomy eDiscovery and the Vertica analytics platform. HP also – without any hint of amusement despite its legal squabbles with ex-Autonomy execs – announced a legal and compliance performance suite for Autonomy.

The British-founded company is currently the focus of lawsuits over the amount HP paid to acquire the company in 2011

Autonomy goes legal

Hewlett-Packard does not do irony, so we assume it is a coincidence HP has chosen this moment to stand up Autonomy CEO Andrew Joiner (pictured) with a new product which extends Autonomy’s ability to sift meaning from data into the legal world.

However, a product designed to extract facts to support legal cases could prove useful to the legal teams working on Autonomy-related lawsuits, HP vice president for information governance Brian Weiss acknowledged to TechWeekEurope.

HP is accusing former Autonomy executives of lying about the company’s performance, and HP shareholders are suing HP executives and their auditors over the record-breaking $10 billion price paid for the British software company.

In a stage double act, Joiner and Colin Mahoney of Vertica both extolled the virtues of having been acquired to become part of HP’s converged hardware, software and services organisation. “We are on the software side, but our credibility is based on being able to come in with the entire solution,” said Mahoney.

HP launched three new instances of the most packaged version of that combined solution, in the shape of AppSystem appliances for Hadoop, Autonomy eDiscovery and Vertica.

Paul Miller, HP vice president for converged systems, was there to assure the press that HP’s appliances are better than, for example, Oracle Exadata systems because they are more flexible: “People want the simplicity of an appliance, without the rigidity.”

The Hadoop appliance includes increased memory on the ProLiant DL380 servers included, and Cloudera management software.

The Vertica appliance is optimised for HP storage servers and networks, while the Autonomy eDiscovery appliance could again come in handy for legal eagles clustering round HP and Autonomy, as it is designed to speed up the extraction of information from piles of data provided in response to legal requests.

Alongside this, HP launched a new version – 6.1 – of the Vertica analytics package,which has new statistics capabilities and better cloud deployment, said Mahoney.

And the company rounded up its software pageant with a “proactive care” package for SAP which is designed to spot problems and actively support users.

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