Autonomy Not Longer a Search Vendor
July 6, 2009
Notch up at $15 million software compliance deal for Autonomy,. For the details read “Autonomy Corp Wins $15 Million Compliance Solutions Order From US Bank”. The deal is worth more than the combined revenues of Funnelback, Lexalytics, and Vivisimo—to name three vendors of search and content processing. The deal about more than one tenth of Endeca’s revenues. I think what the deal makes clear is:
- Terminology for describing a vendor as in the search business is not indicative of what the coming is selling
- Search vendors who stick to basic indexing and retrieval will have a tough time making a value proposition that causes big companies to pump out $15 million contracts with enthusiasm
- The notion of what it takes to succeed in the contentious, competitive world of enterprise search has to be rethought.
Autonomy has emphasized that it is a leader in enterprise search. I think it has morphed into a different type of software3 outfit. Any thoughts for adjectives that would describe this space?
Stephen Arnold, July 6, 2009
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5 Responses to “Autonomy Not Longer a Search Vendor”
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What about ‘beyond search’?
What about “Meaning based… whatever”?
They have focused on EDiscovery and Compliance, which is an extremely valuable use case of search/information access style applications.
The issue isn’t that they’re not a search company anymore, the problem is that the word “search” is simply too vague. If all you’re talking about is having a search box that searches documents, then that has been a commodity for years now, and is simply an ante to play the more lucrative, harder search games that the big vendors are now playing. Autonomy’s move into the EDiscovery and Compliance arenas is indicative of this.
FYI, Vivisimo’s revenue is already well above $15M… and we are talking “real” not “expected revenue” 😉
Autonomy has not been a search vendor for a number of years. As a former sales person we rarely use the word “Search”. You should think of Autonomy like any other database vendor such as Microsoft, Oracle etc…. Unlike databases where they specialise in processing structured data Autonomy is adept at processing huge quantities of unstructured data. They can power all sorts of applications that rely on being to work with complex content types such as emails, documents, webpages, blogs, video and speech. This is really just the beginning as in the coming years there will be more and more emphasis on being to harness and process these types of information so that businesses can understand their assets and liabilities.