HPE Acquiring Pachyderm to Expand AI Capabilities

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is acquiring Pachyderm, a startup that delivers software to automate reproducible machine learning (ML) pipelines that target large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) applications.

HPE will integrate Pachyderm software with its existing supercomputing and AI solutions. The combined HPE solution will deliver an integrated ML pipeline and platform to accelerate a customer’s AI journey from proof of concept (POC) to production with higher efficiency and lower costs.

This acquisition builds on HPE’s February 2022 investment in Pachyderm through its venture capital arm, Hewlett Packard Pathfinder. The transaction should close this month.

HPE isn’t saying how much it’s paying for Pachyderm.

HPE Partners Get More from Pachyderm Acquisition

Evan Sparks is HPE’s chief product officer for AI. He said HPE partners will benefit from the Pachyderm acquisition.

HPE’s Evan Sparks

“By enriching our portfolio with a broader end-to-end AI-at-scale software offering, our partners will be able to offer a more comprehensive solution to their customers,” he said. “We recognize that we do not cover the entirety of the solution space with our offerings. And to the extent that Pachyderm’s partners offer complementary technology, we’ll work together with them to bring joint solutions to our customers. Pachyderm was a partner of ours (part of our AI Advance program) prior to acquisition.”

By integrating Pachyderm’s ML pipeline capabilities with its existing AI offerings, HPE will enable faster development and deployment of more accurate and well-functioning large-scale AI applications with the following benefits:

• Visibility on the origin of the data and where it moves over time during the ML lifecycle and analytics process.
• The ability to track different versions of data to understand when data was created or changed. That’s to increase efficiency in making any changes.
• As data changes over time, only incremental data needs to be processed to update AI applications. Pachyderm makes incremental data processing automatic and efficient.

Data Reproducibility Key Problem in AI Models

“Our customers have told us repeatedly that data reproducibility is a fundamental problem in getting AI models to market,” Sparks said. “By offering tools that enable this, we make sure that our customers don’t have to build a brittle alternative themselves or go with yet another third-party vendor. It all comes from one trusted vendor.”

Pachyderm software is available today to integrate with HPE’s existing supercomputing and AI software solutions. Additionally, HPE plans to integrate Pachyderm with upcoming versions of the HPE ML Development System.