HPE steps up AI game with start-up acquisition

The deal builds on HPE’s February 2022 investment in Pachyderm to speed time-to-market for AI innovation

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has expanded its AI-at-scale offerings with the acquisition of start-up Pachyderm.

Established in 2014 and based out of San Francisco, USA, Pachyderm delivers software, based on open-source technology, to automate reproducible machine learning pipelines that target large-scale AI applications.

As part of HPE, Pachyderm's AI capabilities will be merged into one integrated platform to deliver an advanced data-driven pipeline HPE claims automatically refines, prepares, tracks, and manages repeatable machine learning processes used throughout the development and training environment.

This acquisition builds on HPE's February 2022 investment in Pachyderm through its venture capital arm, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, to speed time-to-market for AI innovation at lower data processing and operating costs.

The deal is not subject to any regulatory approvals and is expected to close this month.

"As AI projects become larger and increasingly involve complex data sets, data scientists will need reproducible AI solutions to efficiently maximise their machine learning initiatives, optimise their infrastructure cost, and ensure data is reliable and safe no matter where they are in their AI journey," said HPE executive VP and GM of HPC and AI, Justin Hotard.

"Pachyderm's unique reproducible AI software augments HPE's existing AI-at-scale offerings to automate and accelerate AI and unlock greater opportunities in image, video, and text analysis, generative AI, and other emerging large-language-model needs to realise transformative outcomes."

Nutanix acquisition rumours

Last week the vendor told CRN there are no discussions with Nutanix in response to a Dealreporter story that HPE is no longer in talks to buy Nutanix.

The report came three weeks after a Bloomberg article stated HPE had "expressed takeover interest" and "held talks with Nutanix in recent months."

Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami told CRN in early December that Nutanix was "flattered" by market's rumours of a potential takeover, but said he would not comment on speculation.

"Now, in terms of the rumours and speculation, look, it's not appropriate for me to comment, but we are flattered by all the attention we're getting. And in some ways, you know, it's a testament to the fact that we're doing something good in the marketplace," he said.