HP Autonomy: Tax Methods and a Sidewalk Guarantee
December 3, 2014
I watched Dr. Mike Lynch on CNBC explain, quite patiently, that Hewlett Packard struggles with accounting procedures. He pointed out that HP created a document that explains how a rebasing exercise created the magical billions written off the $11 billion purchase price of Autonomy.
The story gets some legs in “Document Raises Questions on HP’s $8.8bn Write Down of Autonomy.” Note that this a Financial Times’s document and you may have to pay to view it, assuming it is still online when you read this blog post. The link I am providing plunked me in the middle of a wonky “slide show” with the article stuck on the lower edge of the PowerPoint.
The write up reports that Mike Lynch was fired and a team of HP professionals started work on a rebasing exercise. My thought is that if one is going to spend $11 billion, one might want to do one’s homework BEFORE turning over the cash and buying the company.
Dr. Lynch is quoted by the FT as saying:
“The document was completed a month after HP made those allegations and any future valuation of the company would have had to include them. HP’s own court filings repeatedly assert the rebasing analysis includes the effects of the allegations,” he said.
In terms of time, HP purchased Autonomy in October 2011. Autonomy had discussed selling with other companies. Autonomy tapped the expertise of Frank Quattrone and his colleagues at Qatalyst Partners. Oracle posted some information about the Quattrone pitch deck in September 2011. You may be able to snag a copy at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/features/please-buy-autonomy-503330.html.
Autonomy is unique among vendors of enterprise search systems. It was the first company to generate revenues from enterprise search in excess of $600 million. At one time there were more than 60 vendors competing directly with Autonomy. Some like Convera and Siderean Software ran into financial difficulty. Others like Fulcrum Technologies, iPhrase, Exalead, ISYS Search Software, and Vivisimo among others were able to find buyers before the market contracted more. Most vendors of enterprise search either scrambled to reposition themselves or develop technologies that positioned the companies to provide something other than search which was by 2008 accelerating on a path to becoming a low value utility.
HP, as I recall, performed due diligence. After doing the MBA and CPA thing, the company paid $11 billion for a company that after 15 years of invention, innovation, great marketing, and savvy acquisitions was at full sail. At the time of the deal, proprietary search was under assault from open source options that were simply “good enough.” HP bought at a time when valuations of search companies was not just softening, valuations were downright mushy.
HP, I assume, is smarter and more informed than I. HP bought Autonomy, and HP quickly demonstrated its buyer’s remorse. The groaning and moaning about Autonomy not being worth $11 billion is becoming a bit tiresome.
I envy Dr. Lynch for his ability to maintain his poise and temper. I am not sure I would have advised HP to purchase Autonomy. I know what happened to AltaVista, which HP converted into jet fuel for Google. I know that the company has been plagued by management upheavals and products that seem to have wandered from the HP way. Ink is profitable, but it is not a refined scientific instrument. Now HP’s senior manager is garnering some attention due to Pando.com’s write up “Documents Show How eBay’s Meg Whitman and Pierre Omidyar Conspired to Steal Craigslist’s Secrets.” If true, I wonder how reliable HP is today when it comes to presenting facts in a fair and accurate manner.
Exalead commanded a sale price of about $200 million. Oracle paid about $1 billion for Endeca. Microsoft paid $1.2 billion for Fast Search & Transfer. Vivisimo went for a modest $20 million. Now along comes HP dragging the history of its mishandling of AltaVista.com and ponies up $11 billion. I found that number pretty darned amazing, and I have done work with some pretty crazy investment bankers over the years. HP paid the equivalent of the purchase price of nine Fast Search & Transfers, a company that landed in hot water for its financial methods. HP paid the equivalent of buying more than 50 Vivisimos. Consider $20 million or $1.2 billion versus $11 billion. Yowza. What the heck were the consultants advising HP using as a valuation scorecard?
My view is that HP wants its money back. I remember when I bought a 1955 Oldsmobile from a used car dealer on the bad side of Peoria, Illinois. I asked, “Does the car come with a warranty?”
The dealer looked at me and said, “See that sidewalk? When you drive the car off the lot and hit the sidewalk, you get a sidewalk guarantee.”
I had no idea what a sidewalk guarantee was. I asked, “What’s a sidewalk guarantee?”
The dealer replied, “When you cross that sidewalk, you are responsible for any problems with the car.”
HP is now struggling to understand “sidewalk guarantee.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2014
Sci Tech Publishers Quiver: Nature Articles Free to View
December 3, 2014
If you are a commercial database publisher, you have had your share of thrills and spills. But now the funding for libraries is modest and not likely to rebound quickly. Publishers whose content has been indexed now want some kind of compensation and even worse a few are putting up their own online services. But the scary part of relying on other people’s content is that some big guns will just roll over and make their content available with ever looser restrictions.
Nature now “permits subscribers and media to share read only versions of its papers.” Nifty idea but for many getting a third party to digest and highlight the important points is pretty useful. In fact, I think it will be sufficiently useful to replace a subscription.
If you wonder how the MBAs at LexisNexis, Cambridge Scientific, and EBSCO will react to this state of affairs, so do I. Maybe there are some other opportunities to pursue?
How will the Nature “marketing” experiment work out? My hunch is that for some sci tech publishers, no marketing trick will work. The companies anchored in the information models of the past have to find a way to pop up a level or two in the game of information.
Stephen E Arnold, December 3, 2014
OntoText Expands into North America with Strategic Hires
December 3, 2014
The article titled Semantic Technology Provider Ontotext Announces Strategic Hires for Ontotext USA on PRWeb discusses the expansion of Ontotext in North America. Tony Agresta, Brad Bogle and Tom Endyke joined Ontotext, as Senior VP of Worldwide Sales, Director of Marketing and Director of Solutions Architecture, respectively. Ontotext, the semantic search and text-mining leader has laid out several main focuses for the near future, including the growth of worldwide marketing efforts and the development of relationships. The article quotes Tony Agresta on Ontotext’s product development,
“Our flagship product, GraphDB™ (formerly OWLIM) has been deployed across the globe and is widely known as a highly scalable enterprise RDF triplestore… But what makes Ontotext truly unique are three other essential elements: 1) a full complement of semantic enrichment, integration, curation and authoring tools that extend our platform approach, 2) a large critical mass of semantic engineers, professional services and support teams that represent the most experienced professionals in the world and 3) S4, the Self Service Semantic Suite.”
Ontotext has provided semantic solutions for such companies as BBC, AstraZeneca, John Willey & Sons, and The British Museum. Their recent expansion efforts in North America are an attempt to reach more semantic technology users in this continent.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Searchblox Uses ElasticSearch to Power Multilingual Search
December 3, 2014
The article titled Multilingual Search—Easy to Setup and Manage For Your Website on Searchblox discusses the difficulty of multilingual search. If you think search in English only is complicated enough, consider global corporations that must make search possible in any number of languages, all with their own sets of synonyms and double meanings. Cross-language search is particularly difficult, given that the existence of terms that have different meanings in different languages (occasionally with hilarious results.) The article explains,
“SearchBlox provides a simple solution that takes care of setting up search for non-english languages and supports 25+ languages out-of-the-box. Each collection is tied to a specific language which enables you to tune the stop words, synonyms and meta data handling without complicated configuration. SearchBlox lets you search across multiple languages at the same time and display them together taking out the complexities of handling encoding. SearchBlox lets you index multilingual documents like word, pdf, excel and ppt files…”
SearchBlox uses Elasticsearch as an engine. The article lists all of the languages supported by Searchblox, from Arabic and Bengali to Kannada, Slovak, Romanian and Telugu all the way down to Thai and Turkish. Encoding and displaying search results has always been a challenge in multiple languages, but Searchblox guarantees full search capabilities in the whole list of languages.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
UK Paintings Catalog: When Every Does Not Mean Every
December 2, 2014
I love headlines like “Every Painting in the UK at Your Fingertips.” The idea is that “images and details of every painting (in tempera or acrylic) in public ownership through the United Kingdom.” Well, obviously the “every” is not every painting. There is an 86 volume set which presumably presents the images and metadata. The digital images are available at Your Paintings. There is a search box and a number of other options. I ran a query for Patrick Heron, an artist whose work I find interesting. There are some of his pictures in the Tate, and he was born . Here’s what I found:
Pretty thin. The Patrick Heron entry for the St Ives School offers a bit more information.
I am not sure if the BBC index is incomplete. It appears that posting information or links to other UK online sources is not part of the project. Also, the presentation of different search boxes on the BBC site does not make accessing the Your Paintings information easier.
The enthusiasm of the newspaper is admirable. I expect/hope that the service will improve its usability and completeness in the months ahead. The BBC is, as one of my British acquaintences with an Oxford education used to say, performant.”
Stephen E Arnold, December 2, 20141
Open Source Business Intelligence Tools: A Narrow View
December 2, 2014
Last week, a person with considerable experience in business intelligence told me that interest in open source software applicable to intelligence purposes was evident in South America. I poked around and came across “5 Open Source business intelligence Tools.” I was hoping to learn about open source real-time translation tools, geo-coding components, and old-school search software that hooked into some next-generation analytics and visualization components.
Wait for it.
I was disappointed. The write up presented a short list of open source systems that are well known to me. I need more than short comments about Jaspersoft, Pentaho, BIRT, RapidMiner, and SpagoDB. The article mentions three other business intelligence tools: Knime, Tactic, and ERP BI. All good, but not enough for my needs.
One reason vendors of proprietary business intelligence systems continue to capture the attention of some organizations is that the open source community develops in some areas of the barnyard and not others. What about Elasticsearch, Ikanow, and a number of other sources for quite useful open source software that can make significant contributions to business intelligence. (I am tempted to mention some US government open source contributions like NiFi too.) I think an information gap exists.
Stephen E Arnold, December 2, 2014
Recommind Placed on the Deloitte 2014 Technology Fast List Sixth Year in a Row
December 2, 2014
The article titled Recommind Ranked Among Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s 2014 Technology Fast 500(TM) on Consumer Electronics Net announced that Recommind, software application provider, has garnered a spot on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500. This is the sixth consecutive year that Recommind has earned a place on the list of the fastest growing tech companies in North America. The article states,
“The companies ranked on the 2014 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 continue to set the bar for their industry higher each year,” said Eric Openshaw, vice chairman, Deloitte LLP and U.S. technology, media and telecommunications leader. “There are so many exciting products and smart thought leaders driving this list. We congratulate the Fast 500 companies and look forward to seeing them continue their momentum into 2015.” Recommind attributes success to its innovations in enterprise data management solutions…”
At this rate, Recommind seems to be poised to be the next Fast Search or Autonomy IDOL. Customers include AstraZeneca, The US Department of Energy, Cisco, and Marathon Oil, among others. In order to be considered for the Deloitte listing, companies must own “proprietary intellectual property” the sale of which contributes the majority of the company’s revenue. Recommind is a leader in unstructured data management solutions as well as Discovery technology.
Chelsea Kerwin, December 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
OpenText Success Story with South African Distell
December 2, 2014
The article titled Distell Supports Business Growth Through Improved Information Management on OpenText tells the story of the booming business Distell, a South African beverage producer. Since opening in 2000, the company has grown quickly, and the speed of the growth resulted in unstructured data being stored in unconnected silos. Needless to say this was detrimental to the company’s efficiency. The article explains,
“Today, there are over 13 million information assets in the Distell Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platform or repository; with tens of thousands of items being added weekly. Helping make sense of this wealth of corporate intellectual property are OpenText ECM solutions, from archiving to document management and secure file sharing in the cloud. This collaborative, searchable, secure repository enables marketing, sales, operations, production and service functions in one continent to access information from peers across the globe.”
The article seems to convey an OpenText success story, with improved collaboration and efficiency throughout Distell. The company boasts around 30 new employees a month, and ECM’s largest benefit is considered productivity and continuity of services. No word on how this implementation cost, but you can almost hear an OpenText representative asking, “can you put a price on empowering your employees?”
Chelsea Kerwin, December 02, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Microsoft Delve Versus Other Options
December 2, 2014
Microsoft Delve has finally been unveiled, after months of speculation. Now experts are wondering if Delve will be enough to satisfy needs, or if other options will perform better. CMS Wire discusses the issue in their article, “Microsoft Delve is Nice, But are Other Options Better?”
The article begins:
“Microsoft has finally announced the release of Delve, a project that had been hidden under the code name Oslo and about which little was known. When it was unveiled at the SharePoint conference earlier this year, then later as part of Office 365, Microsoft described it as a new way of getting working done. With it, Microsoft said, workers could find any content they needed, anywhere.”
But the article then goes on to say that you can find that needle in the vast haystack of enterprise content, but only as long as the content is within Microsoft applications. Outside of Microsoft applications, other options like Docurated are making a stronger showing. Steven E. Arnold has made a career out of following all things search and reporting on them on his Web service ArnoldIT.com. Find even more discussion regarding Delve and all things SharePoint on his dedicated SharePoint feed.
Emily Rae Aldridge, December 2, 2014
Useful Tip for Elasticsearch Admins
December 1, 2014
Short honk: Elasticsearch continues to outpace the other open source search vendors. I know that some of the companies with venture funding folks breathing down their necks say otherwise. Keep in mind that there is a difference between performing and saying one is able to perform. Elasticsearch delivers functionality that we find valuable. Also, from the information flowing through my Overflight system, Elasticsearch works. Really!
A useful security configuration article offers helpful tips. Navigate to “Elasticsearch: Dealing with Complex Permissions.” The short article provides some code snippets that you will find instructive.
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2014
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