Autonomy: Saddled with HP and Burdened with Real Stories
September 12, 2013
I read “HP/Autonomy Strategy – Still Buy Instead of Build?” Pretty darned amazing. I did not know HP had a strategy. I do know the company has been struggling with outfits ranging from the New York Stock Exchange to its interesting acquisitions. (Anyone remember EDS?)
The write up presents the view of one of the world’s leading experts in content management and related disciplines:
My reaction is this: when software vendors try acquire their way out of chronic product engineering problems, customers lose. I suspect most Interwoven and Autonomy customers would agree. After all, they saw Interwoven use its post-IPO equity windfall to acquire a plethora of other firms, rather than modernize its flagship TeamSite platform, which at its core remains a circa 1997 file management system. Similarly Autonomy went on an acquisition binge (at a time when Apache Lucene was fast overtaking the Autonomy IDOL search platform), ultimately rolling up the Interwoven roll-up, among others.
Yikes. Old news.
The issue is not what Autonomy was. The issue is a now problem for HP. The company paid dearly for Autonomy, watched its founder leave, and gutted the Autonomy marketing machine.
Who or what is lost in space? Management expertise, technology, business savvy? Image from http://urbanshakedowns.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/lost-in-space/
Is Autonomy “lost in space” and drifting? Like it or not, Autonomy was one of the leading vendors generating revenue in search and content processing. Today’s problem is not Autonomy’s. Today’s problem boils down to failed webmasters, poobahs, lax procurement teams, and managers who think search is easy. These folks now face a hard reality: Search and content processing is not for those without technical, marketing, and financial expertise.
Did Interwoven really work? Did neurolinguistic processing work? Some say yes and some say no. The reasons have more to do with managers who think do not consider, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” Now some folks known content processing and findability are not the easy-as-pie solutions marketers, azure chip consultants, and MBA-inspired experts believed.
The problem at HP is more than strategy, and thee may be no happy solution to this calculus problem. You can post that note in your iManage Outlook file and then try to find it after a crash. Don’t forget to use a cloud solution and tuck your data in a proprietary content management system.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2013
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
