Mike Lynch, Autonomy founder and now EVP of information management at HP
Autonomy, an HP Company acquired for $12bn this Autumn, announced the first fruits of its integration with HP in the shape of Autonomy IDOL 10, as well as three new appliances that combine Autonomy software with HP hardware and storage.
IDOL 10 brings together Autonomy’s IDOL technology – which can extract meaning from unstructured data such as audio, video, social media, email and web content as well as structured information in databases – and technology from Vertica, extreme database smarts that HP bought in March this year.
Together, HP said IDOL 10 enables organisations to understand and process 100 per cent of enterprise information in real time.
HP described Vertica as a high-performance real-time analytics engine. Vertica was founded in 2005 by database guru Michael Stonebraker, who was also behind the Ingres, Illustra, PostgreSQL, Aurora, C-Store, Morpheus, and H-Store databases.
Combining IDOL with Vertica in IDOL 10 offers a single processing layer for forming a conceptual, contextual and real-time understanding of all forms of data, both inside and outside an enterprise, HP said.
Speaking to CBR, Autonomy founder and now executive vice president of information management at HP, Mike Lynch, said work on the project has been underway since HP bought Vertica in March. While HP did not own Autonomy back then, as an Autonomy OEM HP had started to bring the platforms together.
"The great thing about Vertica is that it can run in memory or on disk or some combination of the two, so customers have a choice of where they want to run it," Lynch said. "In-memory may work out more expensive so this gives customers choice."
Lynch said Vertica is very good at doing columnar processing, so adding its capabilities to the IDOL platform for IDOL 10 offers a single processing layer that enables organisations to extract meaning and act on all forms of information, from audio to video or machine-based data.
Autonomy said that by enabling computers to understand the shades of grey in the world, rather than simply the black and white found in databases, Autonomy Information Management allows businesses to automate key processes and improve an organisation’s efficiency.
This, Lynch said, allows organisations, "To automatically process, understand, and act on 100 percent of their data, in real-time. The results will be dramatic, as businesses can develop entirely new applications that explore the richness and colour of human information that live in unstructured, semi-structured, and structured forms."
IDOL 10 also introduces five new solution sets: HP Big Data Solutions, HP Social Media Solutions, HP Risk Management Solutions, HP Cloud Solutions and HP Mobility Solutions. It also features "Manage-in-place" technology, which forms an index of all forms of data, allowing information to reside in its original location, and a NoSQL interface that provides a single processing layer to perform cross-channel analytics that understands both structured and unstructured data.
The Vertica Analytics Platform includes native in-database analytics, including new capabilities for geospatial, event-series pattern matching, event-series joins, and advanced aggregate statistical and regression analytics. Enhanced elasticity features are said to enable dynamic expansion and contraction of clusters more than 20 times faster in every deployment scenario – cloud, virtual and physical.
IDOL 10 is scheduled to be available worldwide on December 1st. The firm said existing IDOL customers will get the new version for free, though new functions such as the Vertica real-time engine are considered chargeable extras.
Science of the appliance
Also today, Autonomy announced the availability of three new HP Autonomy Appliances claimed to provide organisations with turn-key solutions for specific applications. Again powered by IDOL, the new appliances provide organisations with solutions for archiving, eDiscovery, and enterprise search.
These tuned appliances are said to be optimised architectures based on Autonomy IDOL and HP Converged Infrastructure, including HP ProLiant servers and HP Storage.
The appliances are slated for delivery in Q1 2012.
Related: Autonomy shakes up database market with IDOL SPE
Related: Autonomy nails augmented reality (CBR podcast with Mike Lynch)
