Autonomy: Nosing into Customer Support

September 30, 2008

TMCNet.com reported today (September 29, 2008) that Autonomy signed a deal with Telerx. Telerx is a vendor of automated systems that capture, process, and analyze customer interactions with a company. You can read Raju Shanbhag’s write up here. Autonomy is providing some of its analytics technology to Telerx. And, according to Mr. Shanbhag:

Autonomy’s innovative monitoring tools will be used by Telerx to maintain and enhance the quality of its interactions. This will ensure that its clients’ customers continue to receive the best possible service.

You can get more information about Telerx here. The company has its US headquarters in lovely Horsham, Pennsylvania with other offices in Canada, the Philippines, and Panama (I think?).

You can get information about Autonomy’s analytics sub systems here. If you have never seen an Autonomy analytics dash board, I found an old screen capture I snagged from an Autonomy white paper a year ago. Here’s a peek at what a licensee can do with the analytics system. This is a “heat map” visualization manipulating data from the Autonomy analytics sub system. Red means important; green, not so important. Click on a segment of the map and you see the underlying data. Some folks love these visualizations. I can take them or leave them.

As an aside, at the recent Enterprise Search Summit in San Jose, a person (who shall remain nameless) wanted to know why I don’t “beat up on” Autonomy. I thought this was an interesting coincidence because someone wrote me an email a week or so before the conference. The answer is, I suppose, is that I beat up on the vendors equally. I’m on record as a strong critic of enterprise and content management in general. I write about vendors to capture a time line of news and to create a digital diary for myself. I use the Web log format because it’s easy, and I can find references on it pretty easily with the Blossom.com search system.

Today I “beat up on” Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, and an individual person writing a Web log article about the incidence of failure in start ups. I am trying to spread my brand of personal writing around, but I think I am just inclined to focus on issues that strike me as interesting. Instead of saying, “Have a nice day”, I try to look at what must be done to get another angle on an issue. So, when I “beat up on” a company, I am really in “learn mode” and I don’t really have much emotion for or against the companies, people, or ideas I tackle in the Web log.

I will tell you one thing. Autonomy seems to be a step ahead of many other vendors in the search and content processing space. Take that either as praise (making money in a narrow and declining segment) or criticism (a company trying to escape from the confines of search). Your decision. I’m neutral and just reporting another “contract win” that popped into my news reader.

Stephen Arnold, September 30, 2008

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Enterprise, News, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.