Yesterday H-P agreed to buy U.K. software firm Autonomy Corp. for $10billion to move into the enterprise information management (EIM) software business. H-P wants to add IP to its portfolio, build next generation information platforms, and create a vehicle for services. They are following IBM's strategy of acquiring software to sell to accompany their hardware and services. With Autonomy under its wing, H-P plans to help enterprises with a big, complicated problem - how to manage unstructured information for competitive advantage. Here's the wrinkle - Autonomy hasn't solved that problem. In fact it's not a pure technology problem because content is so different than data. It's a people, process problem too.
Here is the Autonomy overview that HP gave investors yesterday:
Of course this diagram doesn't look like the heterogeneous environment of a typical multinational enterprise. Autonomy has acquired many companies to fill in the boxes here, but the reality is that companies have products from a smorgasbord of content management vendors, but no incentive to stick with any one of them.
Autonomy has well-regarded and established products in many areas of information management, especially pure search, content management, records management and archiving. At the heart of Autonomy's stack is the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL)--their brand name for search and content processing technology. It works by gathering up content, processing, storing, and serving it. IDOL is like a vacuum cleaner with a huge vacuum bag and a lot of fancy ways to improve the dirt it collects. It isn't an automatic fix to the challenge of information interoperability. You have to run the vacuum on the carpet minute after minute, night after night. And the vacuum bag grows. H-P's storage and server business will benefit from this consequence.
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20th August 2011, 03:04 AM
What is Autonomy, without its marketing? 
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