HP to acquire Autonomy

The news

Hewlett-Packard announced on August 18^th an agreement to purchase Autonomy. Autonomy has moved beyond its original enterprise search capabilities by utilizing its IDOL (Integrated Data Operating Layer) as the forward looking platform to provide an information bus to integrate other activities. It now handles content management, analytics, and disparate connectors, as well as advanced searching, to provide users access to data gathered from multiple sources and fitting to their needs. It has also moved aggressively to the cloud and currently nearly 2/3 of its sales are for cloud services.

The impact on MuseGlobal

This is a major endorsement for MuseGlobal’s technology, with its functionality to break down the barriers between silos of information in the enterprise as well as elsewhere. In the words of the IDC analysts (ref below):

“…to a new IT infrastructure that integrates both unstructured and structured information. These newer technologies enable enterprises to forage for relationships in information that exist in separate silos…”

They call this integration a “tipping point” and see that it is a means for a new lease of life for HP in the data management and services area. Again according to IDC it provides:

“A modular platform that can aggregate, normalize, index, search and query, analyze, visualize and deliver all types of information from legacy and current information sources will support a new kind of software application”

Although Autonomy will bring significant revenue and a large cloud footprint to HP, the major imagined benefit is seem in its ability to aggregate, normalize, analyze and distribute information across an enterprise. This is an area where MuseGlobal’s Muse system with its ICE “bus” provides a very similar set of functionality with its Connectors (6,000+ and growing), Data Model and semantically aware record conversion, and entity extraction analysis, providing similar functionality – if not content management or enterprise search. Muse is also very strong in record enrichment so that virtual records can be provided both ad hoc and on a regular “harvested” basis to connected processing systems – such as content management or enterprise search.

Various commentators suggest that this move may “encourage” the other big players who HP competes against to have a look at acquisitions of their own. OpenText is the most noted possibility, though Endeca and Vivisimo get a mention. MuseGlobal is certainly in the same functional ballpark providing functionality for enterprises, universities, libraries, public safety, and news media.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/howlett/making-sense-of-hps-autonomy-acquisition/3345

HP to Acquire Autonomy: Bold Move Supports Leo Apotheker's Shift to Software

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/after-h-p-s-rich-offer-deal-making-spotlight-swings-to-data-analysis/