Autonomy PR Coup: The Financial Times Essay
July 1, 2008
I gave up on the hard copy of the Financial Times. The Pearson operations wizards could not do reliable daily delivery in rural Kentucky. Fortunately, a colleague in a more civilized part of the world send me a copy of “Embracing the Friend, Taming the Beast–Web 2.0 in the Enterprise” by Sir Michael Lynch, Ph.D., Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Autonomy. You can try to find the article on the Financial Times’s Web site here. (Note: The FT is working to correct the search sins in its past, but it is a work in progress. You can also read the good summary by Oliver Marks, a ZDNet columnist here.)
The thrust of Dr. Lynch’s essay is Autonomy, not Web 2.0. The idea is that a host of technologies–social networks, folksonomies, wikis, blogs, Web services–are finding their way into organizations. The key point of Dr. Lynch’s essay was for me:
Next-generation solutions are available to help enterprises organize, manage and regulate user-generated content in a secure, consistent and scalable manner to ensure that employees benefit from instant access to relevant information and that brand integrity is properly protected. Such solutions bring conceptual understanding and an unprecedented level of automation to content management and address liabilities by continually reading entries, spotting problematic content and removing it in real-time. In addition, they can automatically reconcile tags that differ but are close in meaning, or actually provide the level of specificity needed in the enterprise that social methods struggle to deliver.
If you review other write ups about Dr. Lynch’s essay, you will find emphasis placed on the whizzy technologies enumerated above. My view is that the essay sets forth Autonomy’s value proposition for its enterprise software, IDOL or the Integrated Data Operating Layer.
The public relations coup is that this outstanding positioning piece appears about six weeks after the Casenove report about Autonomy. This is not a public report, but I wrote a short note about the report and its assertions here. As I understood the analysis, Autonomy has to make its business model perform at peak efficiency and create an environment in which Autonomy’s acquisitions can generate strong growth.
The difference between my reading of this excellent essay and that of Mr. Marks’ interpretation boils down the the difficulty of pinpointing exactly what business some vendors focus their sales efforts. To illustrate: Mr. Marks refers to Autonomy as a CMS vendor. “CMS” means to me “content management system”. I do not think of Autonomy as a primary provider of content management solutions. The company makes a strong case on its Web site and in some of its presentations that I have witnessed as a leader in search with strong competency in video search, fraud detection, and eDiscovery. The blurring of what Autonomy “does” makes it difficult for some potential customers to know in which software category to place Autonomy, for example.
My reading is informed by my knowledge of Autonomy’s search technology. The paragraph I highlighted above says to me, “Autonomy can contribute significantly to a world in which user-generated content exists with other types of information.”
So, I say, “PR coup.” I anticipate similar “essays” from Endeca, Microsoft Fast, and possibly Oracle. Allowing Autonomy to define the terms for “search” cedes some market influence to Autonomy. The editor of the Financial Times will be invited to some interesting lunches as vendors and their public relations professionals lobby to place another “essay” in front of Financial Times’s readers.
Stephen Arnold, July 1, 2008
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