At HP Discover 2013 in Barcelona last December, Robert Youngjohns, SVP & General Manager at HP Autonomy, shared with us his vision to “have tens of thousands of developers thinking about how to leverage IDOL OnDemand.” Building on this vision, HP Software has been holding global hackathons allowing developers to leverage the platform’s capabilities. At this year’s HP Discover in Las Vegas last week, HP Software’s Brian Weiss, VP, and Randy Cairns, VP of Corporate Marketing, talked to theCUBE host Dave Vellante regarding what’s possible with IDOL OnDemand and what developers have come up with at HP’s worldwide hack events.

A “most exciting” software launch

Weiss explained IDOL OnDemand as one of the most exciting things that HP Software has launched in the last few years. For raw IP, Autonomy works to understand meaning inside noisy human interaction, such as how to make sense of a text document and what it’s about. What IDOL then does is the near-matching and probability monitoring that recognizes more than just matches. It actually determines if something is close or close enough.

“We do this conceptual understanding of human information and that’s sort of the core meat and potatoes of what Autonomy does,” said Weiss.

He added, what HP Software has done in the last few years is harden the platform, noting his company’s heavy investment in what IDOL does and how it’s done. HP Software is also at the point of releasing IDOL as a service, where developers and programmers have specialty features now available as a service layer.

Cairns then pointed out that IDOL is different from the traditional Autonomy model, which was to sell large, complex and on-premise projects. HP Software is taking that sophisticated technology and opening it up in the Cloud, enabling developers to build any kind of application they choose to.

• Global Hackathons

To get the word out about IDOL OnDemand to the developer community, HP Software has been holding hackathons around the world, staging 24 so far. For these hackathons, developers have two days to use IDOL OnDemand and content sources provided by HP Software to come up with whatever they want. Weiss mentioned that one developer came up with an app that, like Watson, plays jeopardy. What the developer did was take the question from the Jeopardy feed, submitted it to IDOL and wrap some pictures and other things like that around it. IDOL got the answers right 80 percent of the time. The fact that this type of application can be developed in just two day is impressive in itself. Another developer created a quick app that analyzes video Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and then determines whether or not a video is suitable for kids.

At this time, HP Software’s whole strategy for IDOL OnDemand is to attract developers to the platform. “The power that this offers to the development community to be able to develop fast, rapid applications that understand human information is we think game-changing to the point where we’re just making it available free,” said Weiss.

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