HP Autonomy has a new IDOL

New product

HP Autonomy, the tech giant's big data analytics arm, has launched the latest version of its flagship IDOL software.

The updated offering features greater integration with HP's own big data platform, HAVEn, which incorporates ArcSight threat detection system, Vertica structured big data analytics engine and Hadoop. This, according to HP, will make it easier for organisations and partners to build big data applications for a wide range of analytic scenarios.

HP claims IDOL 10.5 is more reliable and easier to use than previous versions and has taken into account many of the trends now affecting the tech world.

Fernando Lucini, HP Autonomy's CTO, told IT Pro: "In the lead up to the creation of IDOL 10.5, there have been a lot of things happening that have changed the market and that we have had to consider how to use and whether to include them.

"The first is this whole trend around mobility and people using smartphones and smart devices more. Funnily enough, for us the effect is our users and the end user are much more aware of technology and are using it more. Even for me, and I am a techie, I am much more in control of stuff than I was."

Lucini said the result of this was a need to make IDOL easier to use and manage while still giving customers "more bang for their buck".

The increasing use of the cloud was a second influencer in the development of IDOL 10.5, Lucini said.

"In a couple of years, people may very well not be buying software at all and just using SaaS instead. And even those that do will probably put it into a hosted environment to access it," he claimed.

"In light of this, we needed to make sure that 10.5 was cloud enabled and could not just work well but thrive in that type of environment in order to deliver those features to our customers."

The final trend that influenced the development of IDOL 10.5 was the growth of big data across businesses of all sizes, which led to the integration with HP HAVEn.

"[HP] customers were telling us they were putting a lot of data into these big data lakes', including things like voice conversations, PDF files, Word documents and so on. Because these are very human' and not very structured, they were having great difficulty getting any value out of them in this big data lake," Lucini said.

"In 10.5 we've incorporated a number of technologies that will help them derive value from this unstructured, human' data."

Jane McCallion
Deputy Editor

Jane McCallion is ITPro's deputy editor, specializing in cloud computing, cyber security, data centers and enterprise IT infrastructure. Before becoming Deputy Editor, she held the role of Features Editor, managing a pool of freelance and internal writers, while continuing to specialise in enterprise IT infrastructure, and business strategy.

Prior to joining ITPro, Jane was a freelance business journalist writing as both Jane McCallion and Jane Bordenave for titles such as European CEO, World Finance, and Business Excellence Magazine.