Rumor or Fact: Hewlett Packard to Buy Autonomy plc
August 18, 2011
Just documenting a rumor. My source is “HP to Spin Off PCs, Eyes Software Purchase.” Sketchy info but I noted the purchase price, $10 billion—allegedly.
Autonomy provides search and content processing software to more than 20,000 customers. I covered the firm’s IDOL technology in my The New Landscape of Enterprise Search, published in June 2011. Rumors about big outfits’ interest in purchasing Autonomy have swirled the trees here in Harrod’s Creek for several years. If the deal rumor is true, the shrinking world of enterprise search vendors is moving to snow globe status. Dassault purchased industry leader Exalead last year. Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for the quite interesting Fast Search & Technology “solution”. Oracle picked up InQuira, a vendor of natural language processing systems for the customer support sector. IBM buys quite a few content centric companies but is using Lucene for its enterprise search solution. The vendors still in play may be looking for a white knight as well. Our question is, “Why hasn’t Endeca or Vivisimo been snapped up?” Endeca is quite interesting because SAP along with Intel took some interest in the company a couple of years ago. More info as it flows to Harrod’s Creek.
Stephen E Arnold, August 18,2011
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Based solely on patents and patent applications in the US, only Autonomy looks active lately. Vivisimo’s purported “patent” is still not accessible except as an application and Endeca with one patent in 2011 and although active previously looks sparse in the visible pipeline.