HPE chases risky business with Autonomy and Stonebraker tech

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is rolling out a hosted investigative analytics service in response to a report that regulators imposed $260bn in fines on firms in the wake of the 2007-08 financial crisis.

HPE Investigative Analytics is an umbrella product formed from a stable of products either bought or built by HPE.

They include IDOL from Autonomy – Mike Lynch's enterprise search firm – which you'll remember was the subject of a contested $11bn 2011 acquisition by HP – and Vertica, the columnar SQL database bought by HP for $350m in 2011. The latter firm was co-founded by relational database pioneer Michael Stonebraker. Other components include Digital Safe and Supervisor.

HPE reckoned this lot would allow such organisations to identify and analyse "risk events" and take action to prevent them using machine learning.

These could be found lurking in structured data used in trading and pricing and in email systems or in unstructured data sources such as voice and chat.

HPE's Joe Garber, a marketing vice president for the information management and governance business unit, told The Reg the system would let customers "get in front of a Libor-type event and take action on such information."

"We're not just analysing risk events," said Garber, "but giving organisations the tools to take action on them as well."

According to a 2015 Morgan Stanley report, cited by Garber, financial services firms have lost $260bn to regulators for breaches of compliance from 2009 to 2015.

Asked how much of that HPE reckoned it would have saved (and, indeed, earned) Garber declined to offer a figure, but stated that actually the company was looking at a much wider area than just financial services.

According to Garber, other possible users include pharmaceuticals, life sciences, manufacturing, energy, oil, gas and utilities.

He cited the US Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 as one particular piece of regulation HPE hoped to help with. "HPE is in a unique position to solve this problem because of our heritage with compliance," Garber claimed.

"We've been in the archiving business for 12-15 years. We've been monitoring employee communications for years, for compliance rather than risk. We have deep domain expertise," the veep added. ®