Hewlett Packard Enterprise is acquiring SGI in order to boost its big data analytics and high performance computing capabilities.
The deal, which is valued at around $275 million, will help HPE to expand its presence in the HPC market as well as its presence in verticals such as government, research, and life sciences due to SGI’s existing presence in these fields.
SGI, which offers high performance computing in areas such as data analytics and data management, currently has approximately 1,100 employees worldwide and revenue of $533 million in fiscal 2016.
Antonio Neri, EVP and GM, Enterprise Group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise said: "SGI's innovative technologies and services, including its best-in-class big data analytics and high-performance computing solutions, complement HPE's proven data center solutions designed to create business insight and accelerate time to value for customers."
Unsurprisingly HPE is attempt to further its presence in a field that is growing rapidly thanks to the explosion data across all sectors. This explosion is resulting in businesses increasingly investing in high-end computing systems to run compute-intensive applications and big data workloads that their traditional infrastructure solutions cannot handle.
For vendors this is good news because analysts at IDC predict that the HPC segment will grow at an estimated 6-8% CAGR over the next three years while the data analytics segment grows at over twice that rate.
The company HPE has acquired, SGI, includes in its portfolio an in-memory high-performance data analytics technology, which HPE will be hoping boosts its own HPC offerings.
HPE is far from alone in competing in the big data analytics field as rival vendors also look to capitalise on the growing market.
Amazon Web Services is rolling out an analytics service for streaming real-time data, a load balancer for its customers using Elastic Load Balancing, and expanded container support.
The analytics service, Kinesis Analytics, is designed to make it easier for businesses to query real-time streaming data with SQL. Built on top of Kinesis, a real-time streaming data platform, the idea is that users can now run continuous SQL queries against streaming data.
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr said: “You can now run continuous SQL queries against your streaming data, filtering, transforming, and summarizing the data as it arrives.
"You can focus on processing the data and extracting business value from it instead of wasting your time on infrastructure. You can build a powerful, end-to-end stream processing pipeline in 5 minutes without having to write anything more complex than a SQL query."
One of the potential use cases for Kinesis Analytics appears to be in the space of IoT, due to the streaming analytics function.
