HPE Ezmeral Is ‘Undisputed Leader’ In AI Battle With AWS, VMware, Red Hat: Kumar Sreekanti

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Chief Technology Officer and Head of Software Kumar Sreekanti, the driving force behind the new HPE Ezmeral container platform and artificial intelligence machine-learning Ops software, said Ezmeral is the “undisputed leader” in the race to bring AI and ML to the enterprise.

“HPE has built AI applications,” said Sreekanti, a software innovator who started AI superstar BlueData, which was acquired by HPE in 2018. “When it comes to the [AI] PaaS [Platform-as-a-Service] layer, we are the undisputed leader. Not only are we the undisputed leader but it is open source. So if somebody wants to run DataRobot they can. We have one customer who runs DataRobot on top of the Ezmeral platform. So we are the clear leader [with AI] in front compared to anybody. Tell me where a [Red Hat] OpenShift or a [VMware] Tanzu is running an AI ML application? We are in front.”

As for AWS’ SageMaker AI offering, Sreekanti pointed out that it comes up short because it effectively prevents customers from moving seamlessly to another cloud. “AWS sits in a walled garden with SageMaker,” he said. “The problem with AWS with SageMaker is that when you end up with SageMaker you are stuck with SageMaker. You can’t lift it and go where you want. Whereas if you run on top of the BlueData Ezmeral software you can take that and run it somewhere else.”

Sreekanti—who sometimes is referred to as the “professor” inside HPE, this week unveiled HPE’s Ezmeral software platform, which essentially provides the IaaS {Infrastructure-as-a-Service] and PaaS platforms for partners and customers to build a new generation of intelligent applications that take advantage of the platform’s robust AI and machine-learning capabilities.

Among HPE’s big advantages with Ezmeral is the BlueData AI machine-learning software that Sreekanti delivered to customers at BlueData. That software is designed to run both stateful and stateless workloads—essentially allowing HPE to provide the same cloud experience in a cloud-native or on-premises workload in the data center or even in real time at the edge.

“It is the only one that runs AI ML Spark [real-time data] workloads while running CICD [Continous Integration, Continuous Delivery],” said Srkeenati.

The machine-learning operations for Ezmeral run with the Kubernetes open-source platform on the same hardware as the HPE MapR file system. “What that does is give the customer the ability to get the best out of the whole organized stack from the top to the bottom,” said Sreekanti.