For a company to buy an OS for $1.2 billion, then spend a fortune on developing a new class of device only to ditch it a month after launch along with it's entire infrastructure business, to then pay a massive premium for a software company in one particular space says an awful lot about the thought processes in HP. I can only assume that whoever makes the decisions has been prescribed something very, very powerful.
HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
21–30 of 44 posts
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#22"The Leader in Meaning Based Computing" what does that even mean?!
A type of PageRank.
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#23I've always thought that Autonomy had a strong whiff of fraud about it. I never hear anyone talk about working there, their financial reporting is often shadier than Groupon's, there's a Madoff-esque figure at the top (in the sense that he seems to be treated as almost godlike), and no-one seems to use its products. I know it powers the FT's search facility and they joke about how useless it is. My only explanation h…
I worked for them for a couple of years as a developer. They do have an underlying core technology developed in the very early days of the company which they have exploited to the absolute maximum possible. It works fairly well, but Bayesian analysis of documents is beginning to feel a little old hat.
To be honest I've been waiting for a startup to come around to attempt to disrupt this field, but none has arrived so far that can match the sales team at Autonomy.
They really do concentrate entirely on sales, and have some of the most driven sales people I've ever seen - largely due to seemingly ridiculous bonuses paid to sales staff. That does however lead to issues as some others here have described where they sell technology that doesn't exist - I could tell you some horror stories! The relationship between sales and development there, and the situations sales put the development team in, were the main reasons I left. Having projects dumped on you that were never even discussed with development, 2 weeks before the deadline for implementation, with requirements that were completely unrealistic does not make for good software.
Autonomy always felt like one of those circus performers with the spinning plates. You're always expecting it to collapse, but somehow the sales and legal teams keep the whole thing going.
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#24I've always thought that Autonomy had a strong whiff of fraud about it. I never hear anyone talk about working there, their financial reporting is often shadier than Groupon's, there's a Madoff-esque figure at the top (in the sense that he seems to be treated as almost godlike), and no-one seems to use its products. I know it powers the FT's search facility and they joke about how useless it is. My only explanation h…
I worked for them for a couple of years as a developer. They do have an underlying core technology developed in the very early days of the company which they have exploited to the absolute maximum possible. It works fairly well, but Bayesian analysis of documents is beginning to feel a little old hat. To be honest I've been waiting for a startup to come around to attempt to disrupt this field, but none has arrived so…
Sounds like they might have been acquired for their sales team rather than their technology!
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#25Another way to look at this is that the CEO just announced plans to buy revenue. Some years from now, you will read about how revenues grew such-and-such percent under his management, and it will be up to analysts to guesstimate how much of that is due to operations and how much of that is due to acquisitions.
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked for them for a couple of years as a developer. They do have an underlying core technology developed in the very early days of the company which they have exploited to the absolute maximum possible. It works fairly well, but Bayesian analysis of documents is beginning to feel a little old hat. To be honest I've been waiting for a startup to come around to attempt to disrupt this field, but none has arrived so…
Sounds like they might have been acquired for their sales team rather than their technology!
That is quite likely. They have a huge range of contacts amongst government, educational, financial and just about every other large organisation you can think of. If you wanted to get into retailing software to large business, they would be the people to talk to.
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#27"The Leader in Meaning Based Computing" what does that even mean?!
A type of PageRank.
Not sure how true that is.
At their most basic they do text classification and extraction, as well as document comparison. So you can index a whole load of documents, then train the system to recognise a particular type of document (based on any number of other training documents) and give it a specific classification.
The marketing spin is that you can extract 'meaning' from a whole load of text and deduce what a document is 'about'. Its not strictly true, but you can get a close approximation of that idea with decent training sets and classifications.
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#28[deleted]
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like they might have been acquired for their sales team rather than their technology!
That is quite likely. They have a huge range of contacts amongst government, educational, financial and just about every other large organisation you can think of. If you wanted to get into retailing software to large business, they would be the people to talk to.
Given the HP CEO was at SAP he is probably wants to compete with Oracle.
Re: HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
#30The FT is pretty down about another UK company being sold to foreigners. Doesn't this count as an export? Haven't we just exported a $11bn asset?
Not quite the same as an export. We do get the cash yes, although we will be paying dividends abroad in the future.
I think the thinking is long term they might invest less in the uk, and it is one of our larger companies.
On the other hand it is a great uk startup story, we just need more of them... Though there was Xensource out of Cambridge too.