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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!
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?
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.
I have also had some experiance with HP lab equipment (scopes/spectrum analizers/signal analizers) and love it, all of these where old though (1980s) but they where all better than the new stuff we had.
That HP still exists in the form of Agilent. They still make fantastic measurement and lab gear. They have nothing to do with the computer side of HP anymore.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.