Enterprise Search and the Mythical Five Year Replacement Cycle
July 9, 2015
I have been around enterprise search for a number of years. In the research we did in 2002 and 2003 for the Enterprise Search Report, my subsequent analyses of enterprise search both proprietary and open source, and the ad hoc work we have done related to enterprise search, we obviously missed something.
Ah, the addled goose and my hapless goslings. The degrees, the experience, the books, and the knowledge had a giant lacuna, a goose egg, a zero, a void. You get the idea.
We did not know that an enterprise licensing an open source or proprietary enterprise search system replaced that system every 60 months. We did document the following enterprise search behaviors:
- Users express dissatisfaction about any installed enterprise search system. Regardless of vendor, anywhere from 50 to 75 percent of users find the system a source of dissatisfaction. That suggests that enterprise search is not pulling the hay wagon for quite a few users.
- Organizations, particularly the Fortune 500 firms we polled in 2003, had more than five enterprise search systems installed and in use. The reason for the grandfathering is that each system had its ardent supporters. Companies just grandfathered the system and looked for another system in the hopes of finding one that improved information access. No one replaced anything was our conclusion.
- Enterprise search systems did not change much from year to year. In fact, the fancy buzzwords used today to describe open source and proprietary systems were in use since the early 1980s. Dig out some of Fulcrum’s marketing collateral or the explanation of ISYS Search Software from 1986 and look for words like clustering, automatic indexing, semantics, etc. A short cut is to read some of the free profiles of enterprise search vendors on my Xenky.com Web site.
I learned about a white paper, which is 21st century jargon for a marketing essay, titled “Best Practices for Enterprise Search: Breaking the Five-Year Replacement Cycle.” The write up comes from a company called Knowledgent. The company describes itself this way on its Who We Are Web page:
Knowledgent [is] a precision-focused data and analytics firm with consistent, field-proven results across industries.
The essay begins with a reference to Lexis, which along with Don Wilson (may he rest in peace) and a couple of colleagues founded. The problem with the reference is that the Lexis search engine was not an enterprise search and retrieval system. The Lexis OBAR system (Ohio State Bar Association) was tailored to the needs of legal researchers, not general employees. Note that Lexis’ marketing in 1973 suggested that anyone could use the command line interface. The OBAR system required content in quite specific formats for the OBAR system to index it. The mainframe roots of OBAR influenced the subsequent iterations of the LexisNexis text retrieval system: Think mainframes, folks. The point is that OBAR was not a system that was replaced in five years. The dog was in the kennel for many years. (For more about the history of Lexis search, see Bourne and Hahn, A History of Online information Services, 1963-1976. By 2010, LexisNexis had migrated to XML and moved from mainframes to lower cost architectures. But the OBAR system’s methods can still be seen in today’s system. Five years. What are the supporting data?
The white paper leaps from the five year “assertion” to an explanation of the “cycle.” In my experience, what organizations do is react to an information access problem and then begin a procurement cycle. Increasingly, as the research for our CyberOSINT study shows, savvy organizations are looking for systems that deliver more than keyword and taxonomy-centric access. Words just won’t work for many organizations today. More content is available in videos, images, and real time almost ephemeral “documents” which can difficult to capture, parse, and make findable. Organizations need systems which provide usable information, not more work for already overextended employees.
The white paper addresses the subject of the value of search. In our research, search is a commodity. The high value information access systems go “beyond search.” One can get okay search in an open source solution or whatever is baked in to a must have enterprise application. Search vendors have a problem because after decades of selling search as a high value system, the licensees know that search is a cost sinkhole and not what is needed to deal with real world information challenges.
What “wisdom” does the white paper impart about the “value” of search. Here’s a representative passage:
There are also important qualitative measures you can use to determine the value and ROI of search in your organization. Surveys can quickly help identify fundamental gaps in content or capability. (Be sure to collect enterprise demographics, too. It is important to understand the needs of specific teams.) An even better approach is to ask users to rate the results produced by the search engine. Simply capturing a basic “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” rating can quickly identify weak spots. Ultimately, some combination of qualitative and quantitative methods will yield an estimate of search, and the value it has to the company.
I have zero clue how this set of comments can be used to justify the direct and indirect costs of implementing a keyword enterprise search system. The advice is essentially irrelevant to the acquisition of a more advanced system from an leading edge next generation information access vendor like BAE Systems (NetReveal), IBM (not the Watson stuff, however), or Palantir. The fact underscored by our research over the last decade is tough to dispute: Connecting an enterprise search system to demonstrable value is a darned difficult thing to accomplish.
It is far easier to focus on a niche like legal search and eDiscovery or the retrieval of scientific and research data for the firm’s engineering units than to boil the ocean. The idea of “boil the ocean” is that a vendor presents a text centric system (essentially a one trick pony) as an animal with the best of stallions, dogs, tigers, and grubs. The spam about enterprise search value is less satisfying than the steak of showing that an eDiscovery system helped the legal eagles win a case. That, gentle reader, is value. No court judgment. No fine. No PR hit. A grumpy marketer who cannot find a Web article is not value no matter how one spins the story.
Washington Post Wants PowerPoint Banned
May 26, 2015
Poor Microsoft. Now Jeff Bezos’ newspaper is demanding that PowerPoint be banned. Microsoft did not write PowerPoint. Microsoft bought what is now reviled in 1987. The current PowerPoint emerged from spaghetti code created by Forethought, Inc. I recall hearing at a Microsoft meeting that the code jockey on this puppy was the work of a Berkeley grad. Microsoft took the product and the rest is history.
The Washington Post presents its viewpoint in “PowerPoint Should Be Banned. This PowerPoint Presentation Explains Why.” I don’t think Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon will be adding the author of the article to their writing teams. I was hoping for a bit of Swiftian humor. What I got was a write up that would have benefited from a PowerPoint with zip.
I noted a couple of interesting points:
- I loved this quote: “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” The statement is attributed to General James Mattis. What makes this interesting is that it is tough to command attention in some military circles without a nifty presentation with Hollywood graphics. Palantir exists for a reason, folks.
- Amazon does not permit PowerPoint presentations. I wonder if Amazon’s hostility to PowerPoint influenced the Washington Post article. Perhaps the Amazon phone would have been a success if some PowerPoint effort had been made before paying an offshore outfit to make the gizmos.
- I found the Afghan strategy slide quite easy to understand. Here it is to spark your thinking. I concluded I don’t want to head in that direction again.
- I enjoyed the assertion that DoD briefings would be improved. “officers would no longer be able to duck behind mu mo jumbo slides to bury facts or their lack of understanding of the issues. Ah, the naïveté of youth. The briefings would feature foam core or poster board with artist drawings of the very same information. Instead of bits, the message would be delivered with a pointer tapping the cardboard.
The rather parental statement “Go without any presentation” is going to make it pretty dull for the law enforcement and intelligence professionals in my Dark Web briefing. I have to show screen shots of the bad actors’ Dark Web sites. I cannot describe CP, hit men, weapons for sale, stolen credit cards, false passports, and the other charming points of interest to my audience. Going online is a good idea, but in central Europe underground the Internet connections are often problematic.
In short, Washington Post:
Stephen E Arnold, May 27, 2015
Maana from Heaven: Sustaining Big Data Search
May 23, 2015
Need to search Big Data in Hadoop? Other data management systems? Maana is now ready to assist you. Fresh from stealth mode, the company received an infusion of venture capital which now totals $14.2 million. (You may have to pay to access the details of this cash injection.) Maana garnered only a fraction of the money pumped into search vendors Attivio ($71 million), Coveo ($34 million) or Palantir (hundreds of millions). But Maana has some big name backers; for example, GE Ventures and Intel Capital, among others.
Maana’s manna looks a lot like legal tender.
According to the company:
Maana is pioneering new search technology for big data. It helps corporations drive significant improvements in productivity, efficiency, safety, and security in the operations of their core assets.
This value proposition strikes me as familiar.
Maana is ready to enable customers to perform knowledge modeling, evaluation, data understanding, data shaping, and orchestration. Differentiation is likely to be a challenge. The company offers this diagram to assist prospects in understanding why Maana is different from other Big Data search solutions:
Image from www.maana.com
A key differentiator is that the company says:
Maana is not based on open source Solr/Lucene.
That should chop out the LuceneWorks (Really?) and other open source Big Data options in a competitive fray.
Will Manna’s positioning tactic thwart other proprietary Big Data information access solutions? Hewlett Packard, are you ready to rumble? Oracle. Wait. Oracle is always ready to rumble. Google and In-Q-Tel backed Recorded Future? Oops. Recorded Future is jammed with work and inquiries as I understand it. Whatever. Let the proprietary Big Data search Copa de Data off begin.
Stephen E Arnold, May 23, 2015
HP Autonomy Dust Up: Details, Details
May 11, 2015
I read belatedly yet another analysis of the HP lawsuit against Autonomy. “Details of HP Lawsuit against Autonomy Executives” The write up reports that HP is taking “direct legal action against Lynch.” There is nothing like a personal legal action to keep the legal eagles circling in search of money.
The HP position is that Lynch (the founder of Autonomy) and Sushovan Hussain (former Autonomy CFO) overstated Autonomy’s growth and profits. My reaction is “Yeah, but didn’t you guys review the numbers before you wrote a check for $7 or $8 billion?”
Details, details.
The article states:
The acquisition has been seen as a disaster for HP since the tech giant was forced to write down $8.8 billion from the deal in 2012. The $5.1 billion legal claim is one of the largest ever brought against an individual in Britain. HP bases the claim on a $4.6 billion charge linked to the alleged financial misconduct, roughly $400 million connected to shares given to Lynch and Hussain and a further $100 million loss associated with Autonomy that was suspected of being caused by the former executives’ activities, according to the British court documents.
HP may not be a tech leader or even a C student in acquisition analyses, but it is the leader in the magnitude of the claim it is making against Dr. Lynch. If he is found guilty of selling something to HP who analyzed the deal and then decided to buy the company, he will have to pay $5.1 billion.
I don’t have a dog in this fight. But it seems to me that HP reviewed Qatalyst Partners’ financial presentation about Autonomy. Then HP analyzed the numbers. Then HP involved third parties in the review of the numbers. Then HP decided to buy Autonomy. Then HP bought the company. Then HP found that Autonomy is not exactly a product like a tube of Colgate Total toothpaste. Then HP fired, forced, or tasered Lynch and others out of the HP carpet land. Then HP tried to convert the technology into some sort of cloud based toolkit. And finally HP decided to go after Dr. Lynch. You don’t have to like him, but he is a bit of a celebrity in the Silicon Fen, holds an Order of the British Empire, and he is quite intelligent, maybe brilliant, and in my experience, not into dorks, fools, goof balls, losers, or dopey managers. Your mileage may vary, of course.
I am sufficiently experienced to know that when a buyer wants a product, service, or company, craving—nay, lust and craziness—kick in. “Yo, we’re 17 years old again. Let’s do it” scream the adrenaline charged experts. This is a slam dunk. We can take Autonomy waaaay beyond the place it is today. Rah, rah, rah. Get ‘em, team.”
Autonomy’s management and its advisors knows that PowerPoint dust can close deals. The blend of blood frenzy and the feeling of power one gets when taking ownership of a new La Ferrari is what business is about, dog. Smiles and PowerPointing from Autonomy played a part, but HP made the decision and wrote the check. Caveat emptor is good advice.
Frankly I see HP as the ideal candidate for a marvelous business school case. The HP Autonomy story is better than the Yahoo track record of blunders and blind luck. The management of HP believed something that has never ever ever been done: Generate billions of dollars in new revenue quickly. Google generates billions from advertising. Autonomy generated hundreds of millions in revenues from the licensing of dozens of products. HP got its wires crossed in reasoning which does not line up with the history of the search and content processing industry.
Billions do not flow from content processing and search technology. Investors can pump big money into a content processing company like Palantir. Will these investors get their money back? Don’t know. But to spend billions for a search and content processing company and then project that a $600 million or $800 million per year outfit would produce a gusher of billions is a big, but quite incorrect, thought.
Never has happened. Never will. It took Autonomy 15 years, good management, intelligent acquisitions, and lots of adaptation to hit the $600-$700 million plus in annual revenue it generated. Only energy drinking MBAs with Excel fever can convert 15 years and multiple revenue streams from dozens of quite different products into one giant multi billion dollar business in a couple of years. The scale is out of whack. When I visited the store in Manhattan with the big crazy pencil and the other giant products I could see the difference between my pencil and the big pencil. HP, I assume, would see the two pencils as identical. HP, if it purchased a big pencil, would sue the shop in Manhattan because the big pencil would not fit into a Panasonic desktop pencil sharpener. Scale of thinking, accuracy of perception—They matter to me. HP? Hmm.
This is not bad business on HP’s part. This is not flawed acquisition analysis on HP’s part. This is not HP’s inability to ask the right questions. This is medieval lunacy with managers dancing on the grass under a full moon. Isn’t HP that company which has floundered, investigated its own Board of Directors, chased good managers from one office in Silicon Valley into the arms of a competitor based on the old Sea World property? Maybe. Maybe HP is a fully stocked fishing pond, not a water deficient stream in Palo Alto?
My personal view is that HP has itself, its Board of Directors, and its advisors to blame. I find it very difficult to believe that as talented as Dr. Lynch is that he could spoof HP’s Board, HP’s financial professionals, HP’s advisors, HP’s lawyer, and HP’s Meg Whitman. Hey, the guy is talented, but he is not Houdini.
Well, we have a show, gentle reader. We have a really big show. Where is Ed Sullivan when we need an announcer?
Stephen E Arnold, May 11, 2015
Google: Three Elephants Preparing to Fight Among Themselves
April 2, 2015
I love the Google. I found two unrelated articles interesting for one simple reason: Google is getting ready for its own version of Wrestlemania.
The first write up is “China Blasts Google Security Move as ‘Unacceptable’.” Most outfits doing business in China seek to avoid getting into an awkward position with the Chinese authorities. Anyone remember the mobile death vans? Well, check up on your allegedly accurate current history. According to the write up, Google is not recognizing certain Chinese certificates:
The Google posting was updated Wednesday to note that CNNIC’s certificates “will no longer be recognized in Google products” adding that the Chinese organization was “welcome… to reapply once suitable technical and procedural controls are in place”. An anti-censorship group, GreatFire.org – which has accused Beijing of attacking its services—said the original revelation was evidence that CNNIC had been “complicit” in so-called man-in-the-middle operations. Such attacks involve an unauthorized intermediary inserting themselves between computer users and their online destinations, usually undetected, allowing them to harvest data including passwords.
For me, the point is that Google is lighting up the radar of the CNNIC just as the fly bys by Mr. Putin’s armed forces catch the attention of Russia’s neighbors.
The second write up is even more fascinating, if it is accurate. The article is “EU Lays Groundwork for Antitrust Charges Against Google.” You will either have to buy a newspaper and kill a small bush or tree or pay. Or you will have to pony up money for online access. If the link works, wow, you are lucky.
The passage I noted was:
The European Commission, the European Union’s top antitrust authority, has been asking companies that filed complaints against Google for permission to publish some information they previously submitted confidentially, according to several people familiar with the requests. Shopping, local and travel companies are among those that have been contacted, one of those people said.
Assume the “one of those people said” is delivering on the money information. The idea that there will be legal documents available for analysis is darned interesting. I have reviewed one or two court documents in my work career and some of them are chock full of useful information. Too bad that some documents, like those in the i2 vs Palantir matter disappear after the proceedings, but that’s life in the aeries of legal eagles.
The net net of this is that Google is not just jousting with the Xooglers at Facebook and the world’s smartest man at Amazon. The Google appears to be entering a two front war. One hopes those online advertising revenues continue to pump cash into the Google’s coffers. Two front wars can be costly for human, companies, and the victims of the proverb which asserts:
When elephants fight, only the grass gets trampled.
I am delighted I live in Harrod’s Creek. The mine drainage run off makes grass a scare item. So who will be the grass when Google tussles with China and the EC? I am interested in how a company battling nation states will move forward.
Stephen E Arnold, April 2, 2015
Unicorns and Search Satyrs
January 23, 2015
I read with considerable amusement “The Age of Unicorns.” The notion that in the last 12 months or so, we have entered an “age” is pretty darned silly. Toss in the unicorn, and we have the makings of a slam bam, Manhattan analytic levitation.
The premise of the story is that $1 billion valuations are everywhere. I assume that the mythical $1 billion, backed by very real bucks from rich folks and wild eyed VCs, are the unicorns.
A “real” unicorn and a female venture capitalist. Image source: http://wallpapersinhq.com/79414-white_unicorn/
The Time Warner wizards report:
Today the technology industry is crowded with billion-dollar startups. When Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee coined the term unicorn as a label for such corporate creatures in a November 2013 TechCrunch blog post, just 39 of the past decade’s VC-backed U.S. software startups had topped the $1 billion valuation mark.
The list of the identified unicorns is located at this link. (Relax before browsing this Fortune list. The presentation is designed to boost dwell time and make the user experience similar to visiting a Time Warner cable storefront. I assume the list has 63 companies. If there were more, I couldn’t figure out how to coax the Time Warner/Fortune to display more items. Wow, this was like waiting for the Time Warner cable guy to arrive.)
I identified a handful of search satyrs. In my mind, these are not true unicorns. The search satyr is a breed apart, smaller than the average unicorn, and probably more promiscuous because with each marketing opportunity, the search satyrs behave like chameleons munching peyote buttons.
Search satyrs closing deals for customer support, data management, Big Data (whatever that is), search, content processing, etc. Promiscuous solutions?
My short list includes:
Palantir, which is described as a member of the sector “Big Data”
- Actifio, also pegged as “Big Data”
- MongoDB, which is a member of the sector “database software”
- Sogou, which isthe only occupant of the “search engine” category
What I found interesting is that each of these companies handles big data (whatever that actually means). Each of the companies rely on a database. And each of the companies includes findability tools with their “solution,” “framework,” “product,” or “service.”
In short, these are search satyrs, ready to have a go at any information challenge that has cash and is impressionable to PowerPoints, generalizations, and assorted stories about return on investment, improving an organization’s operation, and solving problems that other firms have found intractable.
In short, these companies are quite a bit alike, but each is positioned in a way that appears to set them apart from their competitors.
- Actifio, for example, manages data. Dassault, a company that owns Exalead, relies of Actifio. With Actifio, Dassault becomes a single data platform. I thought that Exalead provided this type of functionality when I learned about the use of Exalead to manage a global logistics company disparate apps and data. Oh, well.
- MongoDB, which is an open source project, is a repackager and services play. The idea is to become the RedHat of information management. You can watch a video about the text search function included in the data management system here.
- Sogou is Chinese for search dog, not search satyr, but I prefer my translation. The idea is that Sogou is supposed to be a Google killer, presumably more robust than Jike.com which went dark not long ago. Sogue is leaner and meaner than Baidu, the present champ for Web search and assorted oddities included in the index. Will Google rebuild a bridge to China? If the answer is no, maybe Sogou will be a Bigger Dog.
Several observations:
Which of these outfits is likely to generate a payback to their investors? My hunch is that none unless there is some exogenous factor that arrives from an orbit near Jupiter’s.
Which of these outfits will generate a sustainable revenue flow that obviates the need for additional infusions of capital over the next 12 to 18 months? My view is that none of these outfits will pull this off. Again a Drucker discontinuity might save the day, but that strikes me as tough to bet on.
Which of these outfits will displace one of the major players now dominating their business sector? From the hollow here in rural Kentucky, I would edge toward this answer, I would assert, “I am not sure.” Excellence and big money are not locked like protein pairs.
Why, then, are information access systems getting these billion dollar valuations? The short answer is verbal hypnotism, spreadsheet fever, and MBA magic that whips up billions in fantasy revenue before breakfast.
Does my somewhat cautious view jibe with the panting of the Fortune hunters?
Nah. Modern high tech magic is tossing around fairy dust the way TV talking heads output viewpoints.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2015
Enterprise Search Lags Behind: Actionable Interfaces, Not Lists, Needed
January 22, 2015
I was reviewing the France24.com item “Paris Attacks: Tracing Shadowy Terrorist Links.” I came across this graphic:
Several information-access thoughts crossed my mind.
First, France24 presented information that looks like a simplification of the outputs generated by a system like IBM’s i2. (Note: I was an advisor to i2 before its sale to IBM.) i2 is an NGIA or next generation information access system which dates from the 1990s. The notion that crossed my mind is that this relationship diagram presents information in a more useful way than a list of links. After 30 years, I wondered, “Why haven’t traditional enterprise search systems shifted from lists to more useful information access interfaces?” Many vendors have and the enterprise search vendors that stick to the stone club approach are missing what seems to be a quite obvious approach to information access.
A Google results list with one ad, two Wikipedia item, pictures, and redundant dictionary links. Try this query “IBM Mainframe.” Not too helpful unless one is looking for information to use in a high school research paper.
Second, the use of this i2-type diagram, now widely emulated from Fast Search centric outfits like Attivio to high flying venture backed outfits like Palantir permits one click access to relevant information. The idea is that a click on a hot spot—a plus in the diagram—presents additional information. I suppose one could suggest that the approach is just a form of faceting or “Guided Navigation”, which is Endeca’s very own phrase. I think the differences are more substantive. (I discuss these in my new monograph CyberOSINT.)
Third, no time is required to figure out what’s important. i2 and some other NGIA systems present what’s important, identifies key data points, and explains what is known and what is fuzzy. Who wants to scan, click, read, copy, paste, and figure out what is relevant and what is not? I don’t for many of my information needs. The issue of “time spent searching” is an artifact of the era when Boolean reigned supreme. NGIA systems automatically generate indexes that permit alternatives to a high school term paper’s approach to research.
Little wonder why the participants in enterprise search discussion groups gnaw bones that have been chewed for more than 50 years. There is no easy solution to the hurdles that search boxes and lists of results present to many users of online systems.
France24 gets it. When will the search vendors dressed in animal skins and carrying stone tools figure out that the world has changed. Demographics, access devices, and information have moved on.
Most enterprise search vendors deliver systems that could be exhibited in the Smithsonian next to the Daystrom 046 Little Gypsy mainframe and the IBM punch card machine.
Stephen E Arnold, January 22, 2015
Machine Intelligence on One Big Poster
December 12, 2014
I need this in my office. I will dump my early 1940s French posters and go for logos.
Navigate to this link: http://bit.ly/1sdmBL0. You will be able to download a copy of an infographic (poster) that summarizes “The Current State of Machine Intelligence.” There are some interesting editorial decisions; for example, the cheery Google logo turns up in deep learning, predictive APIs, automotive, and personal assistant. I quite liked the inclusion of IBM Watson in artificial intelligence—recipes with tamarind and post-video editing game show champion. I found the listing of Palantir as one of the “intelligence tools” outfits. Three observations:
- I am not sure if the landscape captures what machine intelligence is
- The categories, while brightly colored, do not make clear how a core technology can be speech recognition but not part of the “rethinking industries” category
- Shouldn’t Google be in every category?
I am confident that mid tier consultants and reputation surfers like Dave Schubmehl will find the chart a source of inspiration. Does Digital Reasoning actually have a product? The company did not make the cut for the top 60 companies in NGIA systems. Hmmm. Live and learn.
Stephen E Arnold, December 12, 2014
Enterprise Search: Fee Versus Free
November 25, 2014
I read a pretty darned amazing article “Is Free Enterprise Search a Game Changer?” My initial reaction was, “Didn’t the game change with the failures of flagship enterprise search systems?” And “Didn’t the cost and complexity of many enterprise search deployments fuel the emergence of the free and open source information retrieval systems?”
Many proprietary vendors are struggling to generate sustainable revenues and pay back increasingly impatient stakeholders. The reality is that the proprietary enterprise search “survivors” fear meeting the fate of Convera, Delphes, Entopia, Perfect Search, Siderean Software, TREX, and other proprietary vendors. These outfits went away.
Many vendors of proprietary enterprise search systems have left behind an environment in which revenues are simply not sustainable. Customers learned some painful lessons after licensing brand name enterprise search systems and discovering the reality of their costs and functionality. A happy quack to http://bit.ly/1AMHBL6 for this image of desolation.
Other vendors, faced with mounting costs and zero growth in revenues, sold their enterprise search companies. The spate of sell outs that began in the mid 2000s were stark evidence that delivering information retrieval systems to commercial and governmental organizations was difficult to make work.
Consider these milestones:
Autonomy sold to Hewlett Packard. HP promptly wrote off billions of dollars and launched a fascinating lawsuit that blamed Autonomy for the deal. HP quickly discovered that Autonomy, like other complex content processing companies, was difficult to sell, difficult to support, and difficult to turn into a billion dollar baby.
Convera, the product of Excalibur’s scanning legacy and ConQuest Software, captured some big deals in the US government and with outfits like the NBA. When the system did not perform like a circus dog, the company wound down. One upside for Convera alums was that they were able to set up a consulting firm to keep other companies from making the Convera-type mistakes. The losses were measured in the tens of millions.
Hewlett Packard Autonomy: Law Firm Spat
October 20, 2014
I read “HP Shareholder Wants Scrutiny of Wachtell Role in Controversial Settlement.” Quite an interesting write up. The proper nouns alone make the article a stunner. Here’s a sampling:
- Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz
- Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom;
- Proskauer Rose, Choate
- Brown Rudnick
- Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy
- Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd
- Greenfield & Goodman
The proper nouns point not to actual humans in most cases but to law firms.
In addition to the HP management decision to buy Autonomy for billions of dollars, the litigation is acting like a magnet for attorneys eager to help their clients and help blind justice remove the occlusion from her eyes.
Here’s a passage I noted:
“Wachtell inappropriately represented simultaneously both HP and the individual director and officer defendants,” the brief said, “and seemingly succumbed to the pressure to construct a settlement that unjustly benefited the individual defendants and provided, at best, nominal value to the company. Since the interests of the company were wholly incompatible with the goal of the individual defendants to eliminate their liability, Wachtell should not have provided such de facto dual representation.”
Would a law firm behave in this manner? I assume that the resolution of this matter will clarify the situation. I had the same silly notion about the settlement between i2 and Palantir. I am hopeful, however.
Stephen E Arnold, October 20, 2014
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
