Autonomy Profiled
December 2, 2008
Magazines are jumping into the technology profile business. That’s good and bad. The plus is that you can get a good summary of a company’s marketing message and a description of its technology. The downside is that the writers are not able to put the technology in a context. Nevertheless, if you want a quick useful summary.
A good example of this trend is the eContent profile of Autonomy Ltd., arguably the largest vendor of search and information access systems in the world. eContent’s write up reviews the “meaning based computing technology” that has helped propel the company’s sales to $400 million territory. You can read this useful profile here. For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was this segment:
Autonomy has a market capital of $4 billion. It is the second largest pure software company in Europe and was named the Best Performing Software Company in Europe in 2007.
That’s impressive by itself. When you toss in 17,000 customers, Autonomy is a force with which even Google must reckon. Too bad that the write up did not provide more context for Autonomy, which is a better sales and marketing operation than some other vendors.
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
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7 Responses to “Autonomy Profiled”
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Please, Steve. Get a clue. Autonomy has never made its name in anything but acquiring other companies that barely did “Search”. Being early to market (1996) when being better than Verity 16bit search software was the highest bar Autonomy ever had to scale in its hey day (the late 1990 and earl 2k). Dr. Lynch did some deals and has been laughing his way to the bank ever since without improving his core search functionality over the last 5 years.
Comparing Autonomy to Google highlights your own naivete. Which ES vendor isn’t superior?
Compare Autonomy to a quality enterprise search software shop (MS-FAST, Endeca, Vivisimo, even Exalead) and force Autonomy into a “competitive” deal where the customer is looking for “Search” and not some derivative application like:
– Email Archive (Zantaz)
– Video Search repository (Virage)
– Call center (eTalk)
and Autonomy is a house of cards that is beaten “every” time in true head-to-head competition.
It’s ill-informed “industry experts” like you who provide lazy customers (which you call whales) with this very type of minsinformation that lead to yet another duped Autonomy whale who bought on an RFP alone (no PoC) or foolishly single sourced Auotnomy without comparing and kicking tires.
These same duped whales either never or barely get IDOL software off idle and running in production to any significant degree and soon go back to a more full-fledged RFP having wasted millions of dollars in the meantime and lerning how miserable Autonomy tech supoprt and professional services truly are to try to work with.
You are very gullible, Steve. Please stop the nonsense and before publishing another line of drivel – actually speak to real Autonomy customers – if you can actually get Autonomy to give you the names of any happy customers that are referenceable.
Billy Idol,
I am not sure gullible is the right word. I am an addled goose. I report the information that flows to me from public sources; to wit, the Autonomy profile
in eContent. I do know that Autonomy has 17 000 customers. Some are happy; some are on the fence; and some are not. If you have specific facts, please, offer them. If the content of the Web log disturbs you, please, don’t read it. I follow the editorial policies here: http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/about/. If you object to the presentation of Autonomy in eContent, take that up with the editors of eContent. My point was that the write up did not provide enough context. Perhaps you should take your issues with Autonomy directly to Autonomy or to eContent? Do you have some facts to back up your assertions?
Stephen Arnold, December 2, 2008
Although I disagree with Mr Idol’s tone (I suspect this isn’t the guy who sang “White Wedding” 😉 I can’t wholly disagree with his sentiment. If you strip away the acquisitions, at heart Autonomy is a text search company with a very active marketing department. In fact I’ve just finished ploughing through a 12 mm thick Autonomy brochure I obtained from the Online Information show; a colleague remarked that perhaps they intend to use it, rolled up, to fend off any competitors 😉
We’ve had some experience with Autonomy technology over the years and were never particularly impressed, and have indeed heard rumours of unsatisfied customers, however we have no hard data on this. You can’t fault Dr Lynch’s business acumen, certainly.
I echo Billy’s sentiment as well. I have been selling in the enterprise search space for over 8 years now.
Having competed against Autonomy I can say with confidence that it’s probably one of the most painful implementations a prospect/client could undertake.
In POC engagements, consultants are required to make it work and that could take maybe 8 weeks….In addition, if your someone who cares about company culture – stay away!…..put it this way…employees as well as customers should not expect to “feel the love” if they get into bed with these guys.
Bigger is certainly NOT always better.
I heard an interesting rumor from a disgruntled former Verity employee…Apparently, the vast majority of those 17,000 Autonomy customers never purchased IDOL or even enterprise search.
Rather, the majority of Autonomy’s past and present customers are legacy Verity (mostly Ultraseek and a few K2), Cardiff, Virage, eTalk, and most recently Zantaz customers.
Once you subtract the vast majority of those NON-IDOL customers, you’d have a hard time cobbling together even 500 current IDOL customers around the globe.
What’s the meaning of this meaning-based computing, Dr. Lynch?
Ultraseek is a damn fine product actually, works very well. K2 I don’t know much about but apparently it’s big and complicated.
Most amused by all the false names. I obviously need one myself 😉
I have several years of experience managing enterprise search implementations. My team gave IDOL a very thorough evaluation (2+ years worth), *trying* to make it work, with Autonomy’s direct involvement. We found IDOL to be an incredibly enormous pain to work with, and Autonomy exacerbates it by being misleading and arrogant. Many of the features we needed to see in IDOL were hacked together on-the-fly and passed back to us as road-worthy. The management tools are still deep in development.
From the point immediately following its acquisition of Verity, Autonomy’s marketing has been painting a picture that is different than reality. Their sales literature and conference presentations describe how committed they are to K2 and how easy it is to transition to IDOL. We found that nothing is further from the truth. Even the performance improvements they allege (indexing and searching) were completely false, at least with our data and applications. Making it worse is the attitude we get from Autonomy — that their product is bulletproof and perfect.
I don’t know if the core IDOL search engine is any good because the clumsy implementation kept us so distracted. Did I mention that Autonomy engineers were on-site, performing the implementation with us?
K2 is a dead product and is no longer viable. It was never bulletproof and had its weaknesses. But K2 could be implemented and automated without too much trouble and you knew what you were getting. IDOL, on the other hand, is a loose cannon without a roadmap. It is one big ongoing hack. I am being hard on it but honestly I would just like to see Autonomy start taking this seriously and harden their product into something we can implement and use.