Hits keep on coming: HP buys Autonomy for $11bn cash

Put your Palms together..

See title

I posted on the....

"Apotheker prescribes transformation elixir for HP" article forum that what exactly would stop HP from just shipping the operation to the US (India / China...) 12-18 months down the line. Its "just" IP plus FTE jobs. No problem in shipping that sort of function anywhere. That's really good for Cambridge and the UK.

@Tony Hoyle re 'enterprise search'

Not really a google competitor.

google are an advertising agency with a sideline in variable quality not always reliable and certainly not very privacy-friendly technology.

Autonomy started life claiming they had applications that could extract meaning from raw text (good luck with *that*). From there, via various rounds of venture capital funding and iirc the occasional near-collapse, they have progressed into an enterprise document management outfit, the kind of thing that News International would find really useful round about now.

It is not difficult to extract meaning from text. Or do I mean it is now difficult to extract meaning from text. Or both. Or neither.

But if all you want to do is reliably find documents relating to a certain subject area, that's probably more plausible.

"Its not about spelling, its about meaning."

True, but sometimes the two are difficult to separate.

E.g. earlier in this topic we had

It is now difficult to extract meaning from text.

and

It is not difficult to extract meaning from text.

One character different, both perfectly valid, but completely different meanings.

10.24 Billion USD? WTF!

10.24 billion for 1900 Autonomy employees.

Are those 1900 all Einstein clones?

I doubt it.

And I doubt if they'll all stick around after they've picked up their proceeds from the sale.

Good luck to them I say, shame about the zero-payrise for the HP staff.

what does Autonomy do?

Sponsors Tottenham Hotspur.

Autonomy - a SAP play all over again?

I wouldn't listen to the Beeb on Autonomy -- Mike Lynch is a BBC Director. Shortly after that, the Beeb cut Autonomy a nice big check for their search technology. He also started appearing regularly on BBC Radio 4 business programs, where he rambled on somewhat incoherently and got a bit abrupt with Evan Davies.

Autonomy basically owns Enterprise Search, after their most capable competitor, FAST, was consumed by Microsoft and basically disappeared (I suspect that team got re-directed to work on Bing). The core search technology is basically a Bayesian inference engine, and it can do some very clever things, so long as you have enough money to keep paying consults to make it work, and enough cash to buy it disk space -- some of the indexes it generates can be 2-3x the size of the original dataset.

Autonomy has mercilessly applied this technology to legal discovery, by ramming the search engine into the Zantaz email archiving product it acquired. Although this combo is not cheap, it is way cheaper than employing hundreds of lawyers to do document review, so this has proven quite lucrative.

What is amazing about this deal is the valuation. Autonomy's core business can only scale by adding people -- it's a pro services company in disguise. You basically have to double the number of people to double the revenue. To make back $11Bn, you'd need to grow the company 10x. The chances of being able to scale the company that way are almost zero.

On the other hand, high complexity, highly expensive software that requires millions to integrate? Sounds like SAP...