HPE touts biz analytics resurgence in APAC with machine learning

Machine learning has brought about renewed innovation in the realm of data analytics, addressing gaps associated with previous tools and bolstering confidence among Asia-Pacific enterprises in big data technologies.

Organisations across the region increasingly were turning to big data analytics for deeper insights and to identify new business opportunities, said Darren Ong, HPE's Asia-Pacific and Japan vice president of big data platform. In Australia, for instance, businesses across key verticals such as finance, government, and security, were starting to spend more in this space to generate new revenue streams or seek answers to questions they currently were unable to answer, said Ong.

He added that the market was gaining more confidence in big data technologies, with revenue streams clearly defined and business cases established.

Japan's marketing industry also was assessing big data, with the online and telecom sectors showing strong interest in analytics for semi-structured data such as access logs, he said, pointing to strong interest in big data analytics also among India's telco and e-commerce industries.

In Singapore, he noted interest in HPE's data analytics offerings Vertica and Idol from organisations in the transport, government, telecoms, and retail sectors, who were keen to tap data from points-of-sale to gain better insights of their customers.

"Across the board, businesses are looking to drive analytics performance and associated cost efficiency, with the intent to analyse more data across their entire organisations with more accuracy and depth," Ong explained. "E-commerce companies, for example, are tapping big data analytics to better serve their customers, including analytics in areas like click stream analysis and consumer interactions with online points-of-sale to improve the overall customer experience."

"The software industry is on the cusp of a new era of breakthroughs, driven by machine learning, that will power data-driven applications across all facets of life," he said.

The HPE executive was speaking Wednesday at the vendor's Advanced Analytics World Tour in Singapore, which also marked the Asia-Pacific launch of its cloud-based machine learning service, HPE Haven OnDemand.

Delivered via Microsoft's Azure platform, Haven OnDemand is touted to offer advanced machine learning APIs and services that allow developers and businesses to build data-driven mobile and enterprise applications. It currently provides more than 60 APIs and services, including audio-video analytics and unstructured text indexing, and has more than 12,700 registered developers generating millions of API calls per week, HPE said.

Machine learning is changing the game, pushing the market's evolution--once focused on data mining, business intelligence, and offline analytics--to real-time learning in every app and service, said Jeff Veis, HPE's vice president of marketing for big data platform.

An increasingly data-driven environment had created several key challenges for businesses, which had to deal with the growing velocity and volume of data that was often siloed, Veis explained. Furthermore, it was often difficult for business managers to access or harness data in a way that was relevant to their role.

Analytics also was commonly viewed as passive reporting that was too complex and slow to offer any real insights, he said, adding that churning monthly data reports was no longer sufficient to keep pace with market changes.

By offering its services on the cloud, Ong said HPE hoped to bring machine learning capabilities--traditionally reserved for trained data scientists and high-end deployments--to the mainstream developer community.