HP Shares Some of Its 2013 Autonomy Positioning
April 17, 2013
Readers of this information service, which I use to keep track of information I find useful for my columns and speeches, know that I have held Autonomy’s marketing in high regard. There are some azure chip consultants and failed webmasters who pointed out that the phrase “meaning based computing” was not particularly useful. I disagreed. Autonomy—the pre acquisition version of the company—was a darned good marketing and sales organization.
What is easily forgotten in today’s “did I get more traffic on my Facebook page” world is that Autonomy excelled in three areas:
- The company was able to enter new markets such as video indexing and fraud detection when other search vendors were running around pitching, “We can index all an organization’s information in one interface.” Autonomy picked a sector and figured out how to paint a compelling story around the IDOL black box, the notion of autonomous operation to reduce some costs, and “meaning based computing.” Competitors responded with a flood of buzz words, which made sense at an off site strategy meeting, but did not translate to simple propositions like “automatic,” reduce costs, and process content in more than 400 different formats.” As a sales pitch, Autonomy did a good job and managed to stay at the top of the search vendor stack in terms of closing deals.
- The company used a combination of buying firms which would permit upsells of IDOL related products and very capable management methods to help make the deals pay off. Examples range from the Zantaz buy and the subsequent leveraging of that firm’s technology into cloud service. Autonomy bought Interwoven and pulled together its marketing services into a reasonably compelling bundle of analytics with IDOL sauce.
- Autonomy developed what I thought were clever products and services which caught the eye of certain customers and helped the firm enter new markets. Examples range from the now mostly forgotten Kenjin (a smart desktop service) to Aurasma, a virtual reality service for print advertisers.
HP’s management and advisors paid a lot of money to own Autonomy. Like most search and content processing acquisitions, the realties of running a company in this very tough sector became apparent after a few months. I am not interested in the financial and legal battles underway. What’s important is that HP purchased a company, and HP now has to make it work.
A very interesting pair of articles or semi-marketing type articles appeared in eWeek on April 16, 2013. The first is “HP’s Autonomy: 10 Ways It’s Contributing to HP’s Hardware Story.” These slideshows are ways to get page views. Please, flip through the images in the slideshow. Here’s what I noted:
First, HP seems to acknowledge that turnover and management of the HP version of Autonomy has been a problem. The slideshow calls this a “rebirth”. But the big news from a marketing historian’s point of view is that “meaning based computing” is gone and replaced by “the OS for human information.” I find this fascinating. On one hand, competitors can now carp at the scope of the IDOL technology. On the other, in this social buzzword era, “human information” is actually quite a nice turn of phrase. I won’t make a big deal of the fact that when IDOL’s fraud detection algorithms are working on content, the data does not have to be “human” at all. It can be based on a person’s credit transaction, but algorithms for fraud work on machine and human generated information. No big deal because such distinctions are not of interest in today’s here and now environment.
Second, I did not notice much emphasis on search and retrieval. For someone familiar with Autonomy IDOL, I suppose that search is self evident. Autonomy, however, is mostly an information access system. The add ons were, as I noted above, were extensions or wrappers of the IDOL core, based on Bayesian methods and enhanced in many ways since the mid 1990s. Yep, Autonomy’s technology may seem magical to HP management, but it has been around a while and does not perform some of the functions which Google backed Recorded Future performs or which a skilled SAP programmer can crank out. To me, this is a big deal because it underscores the futility of HP’s trying to make big money deals based on plain old search. Companies chasing search deals are not landing huge deals like those HP needs to make its top line grow.
Third, the “10 ways” are focused almost exclusively on Autonomy capabilities which have been available for a long time. I think that the notion of putting Autonomy functions in a printer interesting, but that idea has been floating around for years. I heard presentations from Intel and Xerox which talked about putting content processing in hardware. Interesting stuff, but the “10 ways” are useful because each makes clear to competitors where HP’s marketing and sales will be going. Examples include using Autonomy for customer support, content management.
Great stuff.
The second write up is “HP’s Autonomy Focused on Big Data, Cloud, Mobile, Security: GM”.
This write up contains a number of quite useful insights into HP Autonomy. The “voice” of the article is Robert Youngjohns, the HP manager for the Autonomy unit. I found a number of passages which warrant quoting. I want to highlight three snippets from the three page article. You can get the complete picture in the original article which is worth reading carefully.
First, the story contains the reference to “magical”. Autonomy is math, not magic. The use of the word “magical” is fascinating. It suggests that Autonomy goes well beyond what “normal” content processing can deliver.
Second, the interview lays out the markets which Autonomy will focus upon. These are, as I understand the lingo, big data, information governance, and digital marketing. I am not sure what these phrases encompass, but it is clear that “search” is not playing a front and center role.
Third, there is acknowledgment that the content archiving market is important. The pairing of Autonomy and various HP products is significant. Autonomy will be, to some degree, baked into other HP products and services. This is, in my opinion, an extension of the formula which made Autonomy a revenue producer prior to its sale to HP.
Net net: The Autonomy for 2013 will be fascinating to monitor.
Stephen E Arnold, April 17, 2013
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