HPE has upgraded its Haven OnDemand proposition to deliver it as ‘machine learning as a service’ via Microsoft Azure.

The product offers a freemium model and has collected around 12,000 registered developers since the beta launch in 2014. Through the leadership of Haven OnDemand CTO, Chris Goodfellow, the service is built on the mantra of ‘the sum is greater than the parts’, utilizing more than 60 API’s which combine to provide machine learning capabilities.

“The software industry is on the cusp of a new era of breakthroughs, driven by machine learning that will power data-driven applications across all facets of life,” said Colin Mahony, GM of HPE Big Data. “HPE Haven OnDemand democratizes big data by bringing the power of machine learning, traditionally reserved for high-end, highly trained data scientists, to the mainstream developer community”

Haven OnDemand includes features designed for applications such as sentiment analysis in text, text extraction from images, face and logo recognition, social media analysis and speech recognition. Developers can also build a set of self-learning functions that analyze, predict and alert based on structured datasets. French start-up Ayni utilized the speech recognition API to help it create text transcripts of live audio streams on its foreign language education app.

Alongside the product development over the last 12 months, HPE has also run an active global hackathon program, which has provided feedback to help optimize the offering.

All HPE Haven OnDemand APIs and services are hosted on Microsoft Azure, building on the long-term strategic partnership between the two tech giants. Back in December, the partnership was extended as HPE appointed Microsoft Azure as a preferred public cloud partner. In return, HPE was granted preferred partner status in providing infrastructure and services for Microsoft hybrid cloud offerings.

“Organizations have massive quantities of information that can hold insights into business transformation, but harnessing it can be challenging,” said Garth Fort, General Manager, Partner and Channel Marketing, Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft. “Leveraging the high performance and scalability of Azure, HPE Haven OnDemand brings our mutual customers a compelling solution to help turn their data into value.”