At a time when the entire PC industry facing slumping sales and the company declaring more than eight quarters of straight losses, the hardware giant Hewlett-Packard (HP) has recently introduced its newest software called HAVEn, a software package to tie hardware and data analysis. IBM is the leader in mining data. The new introduction tells us the difficulties that are facing hardware manufacturers and how they are trying to survive.

HP was in an acquisition mode lately to bring new business opportunities. Its busted $12 billion acquisition of Autonomy and others such as Vertica System and ArcSight gives this new opportunity to tie hardware with software and entry into the data mining business. HAVEn is designed to bring analytic software and HPs high-performance hardware together in a platform to analyze big data. HAVEn will support Apache Hadoop, a popular framework for companies that need to crunch massive amounts of unstructured data. It will help companies to crunch large amounts of data stored in large hardware clusters. The release also indicates that HP is trying to salvage some benefit from the acquisition of Autonomy. With this, HP is going head to head with data mining giants such as IBM and SAP.