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HP Not Giving Up On Autonomy
Nerval's Lobster writes "After defeating a shareholder insurrection that largely stemmed from how it handled the Autonomy acquisition, Hewlett-Packard is trying to resuscitate the fortunes of that troubled analytics-software unit. In an interview, Robert Youngjohns, General Manager of the Autonomy division for HP, conceded that the controversy surrounding the acquisition and its aftermath has proven a significant distraction for the company. ... HP's ambitious turnaround plan involves focusing Autonomy technology, which can help find the right data in huge datasets, on areas such as Web content management and information governance. But it's a big question whether HP can overcome all the negative publicity swirling around Autonomy, widely seen as a poor acquisition: Back in November 2012, HP accused Autonomy's management team of using 'accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company.' It alerted the SEC's Enforcement Division and the United Kingdom's Serious Fraud Office (Autonomy is based in the U.K.), and announced it would take an $8.8 billion write-down on Autonomy's value. That sort of thing could make Autonomy a tough sell to companies still trying to figure out if they even need so-called 'Big Data' tools."
Despite the distractions, Autonomy has some real promise in the 'unstructured data' world. What remains to be seen is how well HP can integrate the bits into their other products. Oracle disses the acquisition but doesn't have a comparable product.
Organization? You must be joking..
Despite the fact that HP paid too much for Autonomy, the reasons for the acquisition are still valid. The increasing ability to store large amounts of data means that big data is big and there are many big players entering the fray. For example, Intel:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/intels-big-data-push/
Many industries benefit from Big data mining. Netflix's new series 'House of Cards' was developed based on data Netflix collected about its users to determine what they liked and it has proven to be a success:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/for-house-of-cards-using-big-data-to-guarantee-its-popularity.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Of course lets not forget the dark side of big data, the NSA and FBI can use the vast volume of data they collect to create statistical profiles of the average American. Any American outside the average is obviously going to be a target for additional investigation.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't try, it means you should try harder!
Idolizing the service economy will get you nowhere in a real hurry. They can't replicate IBM (and arguably we don't need a company like IBM in the first place).
Tech Companies that should liquidate and give the money to the shareholders:
1. HP
2. Dell
3. Microsoft
4.AMD
Disclaimer: I thought the same about Apple in 1996.
I've been always an HP fan, so i'm sad to say this.
Long history short, HP really need to focus on a market they can serve well. Let it be big data software or hardware, but they need to hurry since they already have lost a lot of revenue over the years and some big projects didn't go well (such as HP tablets). Sadly if this adquisition is so known to be a "fraud" there will be less demand for those Big Data tools or they will have to set lower prices.
The sad thing is that HP is really sloppy at hardware right now. I bought a HP laptop (a DV6 envy) very powerful and pretty (i was delighted by the design), BUT with windows 8. I thought "just buy it and then unistall that piece of malware" so i did buy it. BTW i tried to use W8, but i just failed to turn it off properly, (how in the world the shutdown options are in the charm bar at the desktop under "Settings"!!), to get rid of those pesky apps, to make the Metro less bloated and a lot of etc.
After one hour of looking for a way to disable UEFI (some shady forums helped me actually) and boot from a windows 7 dvd (changing the order of the boot devices doesn't work) i tried for what it seems an hour to install windows 7. At the very last step i had an error of incompatible hardware. I just went mad, i don't get it how an OS that isn't old (last year was the most advanced windows OS) was incompatible with a brand new laptop. I asked for a refund so i got a samsung instead (not that pretty but the inside is what it counts).
Sometimes it's better not having signature
Isn't it a trifle interesting to see the language used to describe the (ostensible) owners of the company attempting to exert control over the people who are allegedly just hired to run it?
"Shareholder revolt" in the LA Times, "Shareholder insurrection" in TFS, and this was reporting on a vote, taken by shareholders, on the board members(notably, unlike political elections, the incumbent remains in office unless at least half of voting stock votes against them, not by actually having to compete against other candidates for votes). Two of the directors barely survived, at 54 and 55 percent respectively.
so they allege. this would mean they need a crook to resuscitate the numbers. watch out guys, your phones are tapped and they're reading your emails now. and it's not just the board this time...
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Hmm - recent acquisitions tied directly to Big Data/analytics stuff...check. Acquiring EDS...check. Putting less emphasis on hardware...check.
Looks like HP is trying to become IBM!
I hope it works for them, but I'm worried about losing one of the last providers of half-decent hardware. Forget about the raft of consumer garbage they manufacture or OEM for Best Buy -- their business line of PCs, notebooks and servers is still solid. [1] We use a mix of HP and IBM servers, and almost all HP PCs and laptops. These two vendors, IMO, are the last ones that (a) make a decent, well-built product, (b) have the support structure in place to fix something worldwide when it breaks, and (c) support stuff with a long enough hardware lifecycle. HP is a good compromise vendor -- great hardware with...OK...support. IBM will bend over backwards to fix problems (even if their massive labyrinth of support is hard to navigate on your own,) but only with the purchase of expensive support entitlements and a much higher hardware price. [2]
But anyway, I just don't see this working for HP the same way it did for IBM. IBM had oceans of money in reserve plus the mainframe business generating truckloads of cash every month to finance their turnaround. Plus, even though they have exited a lot of the customer facing hardware business (POS terminals, selling the PC business to Lenovo, selling the printer business to Ricoh, etc. etc.) they are still doing a lot of their own hardware engineering and own two proprietary platforms (POWER and System z/Mainframe)
[1] By "business line", I mean the Elite PC line, the EliteBook laptop line and ProLiant servers. I hear tons of people complaning that their HP Pavillion or Envy is total crap and the support is an Indian script-reader. Well, what did you expect for a $299 disposable laptop? If you spend the money you can get decent engineering and support!
[2] But, with that high hardware price for Flex System, System x and BladeCenter, you get US-based tech support and service technicians who have a clue. Once you find the right resource at IBM, I've never had any complaints with their service. Getting to them is the problem.....
On the other hand, when a company pays a large amount of money to acquire something, whoever supported the acquisition it is on the hook for proving that whatever they bought was worth the money. One way those people can delay the day of reckoning on a bad investment is to convince the higher-ups that if you just give it more time and money you can make it worth something.
I am officially gone from
Having worked with Autonomy on multiple occasions, my chief complaint is that while their software may be incredibly capable in the math and statistics arenas, they can't do web development to save their souls. A virtually complete lack of comprehension of HTTP, SSL, and HTML is all you can expect from their engineers.
It's more than the traditional "I don't want to customize my software even though I only have 20 potential clients so I will call it COTS" crap that we all hate so well. They cobble together so many layers of gunk that there is no way for them to understand what is actually happening between their servers and clients leaving them with no way to fix problems even if they wanted to.
Would be a simple matter of returning quality to their products.
They can start with their driver software, that alone would raise my opinion of them.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Junk computers and shit-tastic enterprise software. I have to use not only a shitty HP laptop for my job but also several of their "enterprise" software packages as part of my job duties. Goddamn, HP sucks ass...
That's funny--I just got a call from my HP/Autonomy rep last week for the first time in years. In addition to many other failings, Autonomy hasn't done much to keep existing customers happy. Then a big how-are-you-doing, here's-what's-new presentation today, during which I had to mute the phone to hide my laughter at the brag slide about IDOL's amazing ability to extract meaning from unstructured data.
I'd love for my key app to have a home under a big, deep-pocketed, stable corporate daddy, but HP is not it.
I read that as "HP not giving up on Lobotomy".
They're still making printers and laptops too and I think we all know they have no business doing that either after their record the last 10 years with them.
You mean just like they were doubling down on WebOS?