back to article Autonomy 'poisoned the well' for businesses seeking VC cash

HP's ill-fated Autonomy acquisition has 'poisoned the well' for other enterprise search outfits seeking an injection of venture capitalist cash, Patrick White, the head of start-up Synata, has said. Not surprisingly, Synata itself is working in the enterprise search space and has so far raised $1.5m (£1m) dollars in seed …

  1. Gordon 10
    FAIL

    Fail

    Err if you want VC cash - do something VC's are interested in. Perhaps something <airquotes>social</airquotes> Otherwise dont whine about it.

    Additionally what was the autonomy buy go to do with VC's any way. As I recall both Autonomy and HP were public quoted companies at the time of the deal so any VC's originally involved would have been long gone with their pound of flesh.

    Maybe he just has a "me-too" product in a swamped market? Or maybe like many technology related markets there is only room for 1 800lb Gorilla.

    1. Naselus

      Re: Fail

      "Additionally what was the autonomy buy go to do with VC's any way. As I recall both Autonomy and HP were public quoted companies at the time of the deal so any VC's originally involved would have been long gone with their pound of flesh."

      Indeed; surely any VCs who were still hanging around in Autonomy will have made out like bandits from the over-valued sale anyway?

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Fail

        The VCs don't care about the company now - they care about the exit.

        If no $Bn public quoted company is going to pay $Bn for a search company anymore - then no VC is going to invest $100K in a search startup.

    2. imanidiot Silver badge

      Re: Fail

      Blaming Autonomy for something is apparantly the trendy thing to do right now.

  2. sysconfig

    If Autonomy is to blame for anything...

    it's their absolutely dreadful enterprise search engine IDOL. I had the pleasure (if you consider pain pleasurable) of working with it for a couple of months a few years back. It really hurt.

    I have briefly worked with their voice recognition software as well... a similar disaster.

    If anything, Autonomy must have been a VC's wet dream... Rubbish products sold off far above their actual value.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: If Autonomy is to blame for anything...

      >Rubbish products sold off far above their actual value.

      I believe the technical term is "Enterprise"

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Enterprise search is dead

    HP bought a Dodo. Who wants closed source search engines following a 200x model where the manuals are locked away and a Google search by a developer looking for assistance is next to useless. There are free alternatives now that don't suffer any of these issues.

  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    WTF?

    "Most VCs have at least one enterprise search in their portfolio. "

    And some of them have more ???

    So you've got all these options.

    Can they all be winners?

    I don't think so.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: "Most VCs have at least one enterprise search in their portfolio. "

      There are, and will continue to be, large enterprises. They have and will get more data. They will want to search

      Somebody needs to make the software to make that easy enough to be useful - and it ain't going to be SAP or Oracle. The ones that do it will make out like bandits (before being bought by SAP or Oracle and killed)

      The nice thing about enterprise is that there can be more than one winner. And since the winner often gets bought to take it off the market - you can keep winning with the same idea.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: "Most VCs have at least one enterprise search in their portfolio. "

        Totally agreed and beyond the business benefits there's another reason: Regulation.

        Now, following that through...

        Carly = President = Regulation = Autonomy bringing in the bucks?

        (BTW I am in favour of solid regulation to keep people honest)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shut up you narcissistic self indulgent wind bag

    Boo hoo vc's won't fund me. It must be someone else's fault. Grow a pair, stop whinging and come up with something people will pay for.

  6. Desidero

    Pretty silly - Exalead got bought off the market by Dassault about the same time as Microsoft bought Fast & bundled with Bing & Sharepoint. But Google had a search appliance out at the same time too, and typically people would just buy it because they weren't that interested in evaluating the difference between Autonomy, Exalead, Fast or Google - they took the perceived market leader at a much cheaper price point than the others (ok, not sure about Fast), or they moved to OpenSource Lucene/Solr or its more trendy upstart competitor ElasticSearch. I don't bet that either of the latter is doing that well with support contracts.

    In short, Search went commodity and no one wanted to pay for it. VCs should definitely beware. Not because of HP, but because of lack of paying customers and competing against Google. But sure, Mike Lynch is the AntiChrist & HP wuz robbed. Feel better?

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