Hewlett-Packard Co. is looking to take the driver’s seat in bringing about the era of pre-packaged analytic applications with the IDOL platform from Autonomy, and according to the head of product marketing for the subsidiary, it already has results to show for the effort. Appearing on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at the recently concluded HP Vertica Big Data Conference in Boston, MA, Jeff Veis told hosts John Furrier and Dave Vellante that the enterprise search engine is used to power a range of purpose-built applications which allow customers to make more out of their unstructured information.

Standing out among the case studies that were being demonstrated at the conference was a clinical data management system serving as a foundation for services that each implemented the underlying functionality in a different way. Veis pointed at the solution as a prime example of developer ingenuity that would not be facilitated had HP not made the capabilities of IDOL available for consumption from the cloud last December.

Adapting for the times

The software has been around for about a decade and used to great effect  for simplifying compliance archiving, electronic discovery and other complex enterprise processes that have historically necessitated lot of infrastructure and manpower to support, Veis detailed. The problem was that IDOL itself also required a great deal of hardware to run, he explained, which wasn’t too big of an issue for the large organizations towards which the product was originally geared  but made it practically inaccessible to smaller customers. That barrier has more or less been lifted by IDOL OnDemand, a managed edition of the solution that makes many of its features available through some 26 freely accessible APIs.

Beyond simply lowering costs, the APIs allow developers to embed search functionality – which, in the Autonomy dictionary, includes everything from keyword queries to facial recognized – directly into their applications. That wasn’t practical up until recently due to processor limitations, Veis said, leaving users with no choice but deploy IDOL the old fashioned way.

“You could not get that unless you put the engine into your application,” he said. “Now you can make a call to a private or public application and take what I would have to put thousands of hours into developed and make that into an API call for a web app.”

Translating features  into business results

It’s one thing to make analytical power more accessible, but it’s another to effectively apply that functionality to addressing business objectives. Despite the tremendous amount of progress that has been made on simplifying data processing in recent years, Veiss said that operationalizing information remains a widespread painpoint. Even a task as seemingly obvious as correlating support tickets with social media sentiment to identify opportunities for improving customer satisfaction is still beyond the grasp of companies, he noted, saying that less than than 5 percent of the  organization he had engaged with are doing so.

Another major challenge is mobility, which Veiss sees as the “great equalizer” for user experience, especially as it pertains to delivering data insights. To illustrate his point, he brought up one of the entries at a recent IDOL OnDemand hackathon, an app that could take any online article as input and automatically find similar content on the web. “That shows the power and the necessity of mobile,” he highlight. “If I had a big screen, I could be clicking around, I could be bouncing around – I could be lazy.”

Mobile apps are among the many use cases for the APIs, which Veiss said community of over 3,000 developers that is growing about 30 percent every month. He added that the number of available interfaces is set to balloon  from 26 to more than 50 by the end of the year as HP opens up more IDOL capabilities to the ecosystem.

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