H2O.ai and BlueData Partnership Accelerates Artificial Intelligence (AI) And Machine Learning (ML) Deployments

BlueData and H2O.ai announced their partnership to faster deployment of AI/ML environments with enterprise-grade security and performance.

The BlueData is the provider of EPIC software platform. It uses Docker container technology to make it easier, faster and cost-effective for enterprises to innovate with AI and Big Data technologies. Containerized environment can be easily deployed for data scientists with on-demand access to the applications, data, and infrastructure. The platform supports On-premises, in the cloud, or in hybrid cloud architectures.

H2O.ai owns an open source machine learning platform, H2O and being used in production by many companies in Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Retail, Telco, Sales and Marketing etc. H2O Driverless AI uses AI to do AI in order to provide an easier, faster and cost-effective means of implementing data science. Gartner named H2O.ai, as a Leader in the February 2018 Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms.

The collaboration between BlueData and H20.ai includes integration among open source H2O, H2O Sparkling Water for machine learning with Spark, and the automated H2O Driverless AI with the container-based BlueData EPIC software platform.

Large-scale AI / ML deployments are possible with  BlueData and H2O.ai product integrations. This will result in cost reduction and faster time to value for Machine Learning deployments.

Multi-node clusters for H2O Flow, Sparkling Water, and Driverless AI running on containers are possible with BlueData EPIC software platform. Pre-tested and pre-integrated Docker container images for distributed H2O environments can easily be availed with Bluedata app store.

According to the announcement, "BlueData also offers a data connector to enable compute / storage separation for H2O. With BlueData, different containerized compute clusters for different workloads (including Spark, Kafka, Tensorflow, and/or H2O) can share access to a common data lake. This separation enables H2O users to easily connect their compute cluster to the data they need for large-scale distributed machine learning, while providing the ability to scale and optimize compute resources independent from data storage. The result is improved flexibility and resource utilization, along with reduced costs by eliminating data duplication and reusing existing storage investments."

Executive Opinion

Chief Executive Officer and founder of H2O.ai, Sri Ambati, said, “Our mission is to democratize AI by putting automatic machine learning in hands of data scientists and engineers. BlueData has built container-based innovations that provide secure on-demand access to distributed H2O environments and accelerating adoption across the enterprise. Together we can make it faster, cheaper, and easier for our customers to monetize their data.”

Co-founder and CEO of BlueData, Kumar Sreekanti, said, “Artificial intelligence and machine learning are at the top of the priority list for just about every CIO and CDO in every industry. Our partnership with H2O.ai will help these organizations to deliver faster time-to-value for their AI / ML initiatives across a wide range of use cases for business innovation and competitive differentiation. Working with H2O.ai, we can help simplify the deployment of advanced AI / ML technology and make it more readily accessible for teams of data scientists, engineers, and developers across the enterprise.”

Value to Shared Customers

Customers use AI / ML capabilities for multiple use cases such as fraud detection and credit risk analysis, to genomics research and precision medicine, to improved customer experience. BlueData and H2O.ai share many of such customers across multiple industries. List of customers includes Barclays, Citi, GM Financial, Optum, Macy’s, Seattle Children’s, and SCL Health, the announcement notes.

More information is available at BlueData blog post.