With the explosion of data and cloud capabilities, enterprises increasingly require data analytics services with cloud-like operations. The Structured Query Language (SQL) continues to be a predominant database workload in many organizations. As HPE partners with customers and ISVs to make HPE Ezmeral the target software platform for the full breadth of data-intensive workloads, a clear need has emerged to modernize SQL stack. Current on-premises SQL technologies don’t account for the new requirements around hybrid cloud and scale. As a result, modernizing the SQL stack is at the forefront of analytics transformations, to address the challenges in the hybrid cloud and disparate data space.
Ampool will join the HPE Ezmeral software organization, and will play a pivotal role in accelerating HPE Ezmeral analytics runtime for interactive SQL workloads
To help address this challenge, I am thrilled to announce HPE’s acquisition of Ampool, an innovative developer of a data platform designed to deliver a cloud-native, high-performance SQL analytics engine for data engineers and business analysts. Ampool will join the HPE Ezmeral software organization, and will play a pivotal role in accelerating HPE Ezmeral analytics runtime for interactive SQL workloads, helping to improve quality, repeatability, throughput, and time to value for our customers’ AI/ML, analytics and data-intensive workloads.
Delivering Analytics-as-a-service
HPE GreenLake provides customers with a powerful foundation to drive digital transformation through an elastic as-a-service platform that can run on premises, at the edge, or in a colocation facility. The HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform combines simplicity and agility with the governance, compliance, and visibility that comes with hybrid IT, and provides a range of cloud services, including HPE Ezmeral Container Platform and HPE Ezmeral ML Ops.
The acquisition builds on this strategy by adding Ampool’s technology components and open source expertise to the Ezmeral portfolio, which will over time turn into a set of SQL acceleration services made available through the HPE GreenLake cloud platform. This acquisition is also further evidence of HPE’s investment, focus and execution toward building out an open-source-based, IP rich capability for the HPE Ezmeral software portfolio, to deliver superior end to end analytics in fast growth markets.
Boosting analytical query speeds at scale
Ampool has built a unique, scalable, data federation layer combined with a multi-tiered acceleration engine to boost analytical query processing speeds at scale. Founded by Milind Bhandarkar, Ampool brings a world-class team of engineers from Yahoo, LinkedIn, VMware/Pivotal, and Veritas. Ampool engineers also boast significant open source leadership with key contributions to projects such as Apache Geode, Presto/Trino, Apache Spark, and Apache Ranger.
The nature of SQL-based interactive workloads have dramatically changed in the last decade. Canned business intelligence and reporting on data warehouses have evolved to more sophisticated ad-hoc analytics at higher scale and more diverse data. Current on-premises SQL tools are rigid, slow, and opinionated to specific underlying storage technology such as HDFS. New innovations are required to address the challenge of high data movement costs, as well as data residency requirements.
Organizations require a set of loosely coupled cloud-native query engines that can support multiple analytics and business intelligence tools against a variety of backend data sources. These sources include file systems, object stores, and data warehouses. This need has been the guiding principle for HPE Ezmeral analytics runtime (see diagram below). HPE delivers rich offerings for cloud-native Apache Spark to support batch analytics for data engineering.
Support SQL runtimes to increase speed
Our next focus area is to support SQL runtimes, specifically open source Presto as well as best of breed ISV products for fast, interactive, ad-hoc analytics use cases. The Ampool team brings open source expertise and technology to provide a caching layer to address speed.
The use of multiple ephemeral container-based SQL compute engines, such as Presto and Spark, introduces the need for persistent metadata to be stored and managed externally. Ampool has deep expertise in building a shared metadata catalog with role-based access control, which provides a consistent view of the different backend data sources.
Join HPE Ezmeral on our journey to excellence
We are on an exciting journey here at HPE Ezmeral. We have built a unique, diverse team. This team, working closely with our customers and the open source community, is uniquely fusing analytics runtimes with Kubernetes to offer scale and location independence. (By the way, we are hiring! Enter “Ezmeral” in the keyword search on the HPE careers page to see all the openings).With the addition of the Ampool team, our world class HPE Ezmeral team now has added new expertise to deliver a best in class, open source SQL cloud service on premises and hybrid cloud.
Please join me in extending a warm HPE welcome to the entire Ampool team!
This document contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. If such risks or uncertainties materialize or such assumptions prove incorrect, the results of HPE and its consolidated subsidiaries could differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, any statements regarding the expected benefits and costs of the transaction contemplated by this document, including enhanced opportunities for growth, the delivery of customer benefits and the realization of synergies and other economic benefits; projections of revenue, expenses, net earnings, operating profit, cash flows, or other financial items; any statements concerning the expected development, performance, market share or competitive performance relating to products or services; any statements regarding current or future macroeconomic trends or events and the impact of those trends and events on HPE and its financial performance; any statements of expectation or belief; and any statements of assumptions underlying any of the foregoing. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that expected benefits may not materialize as expected; that the parties are unable to successfully implement integration strategies; and other risks that are described in HPE’s SEC reports, including but not limited to the risks described in HPE’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for its fiscal year ended October 31, 2020 and subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q. HPE assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.
