Artificial intelligence and data analytics are clearly a big part of the growth plan for Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.

After it acquired Nimble Storage Inc. and its InfoSight predictive analytics technology in 2017, HPE was apparently just getting warmed up. The firm has since purchased three AI and analytics companies — BlueData Software Inc., Cray Inc. and MapR Technologies Inc. — in less than a year.

“The things we’re trying to do, especially around AI and machine learning in our division, is to provide a platform for customers, especially application developers,” said Patrick Osborne (pictured), vice president and general manager of big data, analytics and scale-out data platforms at HPE. “Even though we’ve historically been known as an infrastructure company, we’re very quickly pivoting towards being known as an enterprise workload company.”

Osborne spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Boston, Massachusetts. They discussed the role of recent analytics acquisitions with HPE’s offerings and the company’s focus on application developers and providing tools in the containerization space. (* Disclosure below.)

AI integration with Apollo

HPE has not waited long before rolling out new products based in some of these acquisitions. In May, HPE announced an offering that integrated its Apollo hardware and Pointnext services with BlueData’s virtualized container environment for AI deployment.

“We made some investments around BlueData, and we’ve had some recent product announcements around how folks operationalize machine learning,” Osborne said. “At this point, it’s becoming very real and people are putting in a number of use cases.”

There are synergies between BlueData’s technology and MapR’s portfolio, but since the latter was only acquired in August, it is too early to tell how its products will be integrated with HPE’s product offerings.

“The ability to take data and manifest it in different ways was important for the entire ecosystem, and we felt that MapR was a great data platform,” Osborne said. “It started with Hadoop, moved into supporting things like Kafka and Spark, and now has been shifted into a Kubernetes and container deployment.”

It’s become clearer that HPE is building its analytics business around meeting the needs of a growing developer ecosystem, one that includes containerization and the Kubernetes orchestration tool. While he did not divulge details, Osborne hinted that HPE could be making more news in this space during the KubeCon gathering in November.

“We’ve got a lot of stuff cooking with Kubernetes, so we’ll make some big announcements at KubeCon,” Osborne said. “It’s really exciting to move up stack and be in this really cool world of application development.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE