HP Not Giving Up On Autonomy 36
Nerval's Lobster writes "After defeating a shareholder insurrection that largely stemmed from how it handled the Autonomy acquisition, Hewlett-Packard is trying to resuscitate the fortunes of that troubled analytics-software unit. In an interview, Robert Youngjohns, General Manager of the Autonomy division for HP, conceded that the controversy surrounding the acquisition and its aftermath has proven a significant distraction for the company. ... HP's ambitious turnaround plan involves focusing Autonomy technology, which can help find the right data in huge datasets, on areas such as Web content management and information governance. But it's a big question whether HP can overcome all the negative publicity swirling around Autonomy, widely seen as a poor acquisition: Back in November 2012, HP accused Autonomy's management team of using 'accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company.' It alerted the SEC's Enforcement Division and the United Kingdom's Serious Fraud Office (Autonomy is based in the U.K.), and announced it would take an $8.8 billion write-down on Autonomy's value. That sort of thing could make Autonomy a tough sell to companies still trying to figure out if they even need so-called 'Big Data' tools."
Incidentally... (Score:4, Interesting)
Isn't it a trifle interesting to see the language used to describe the (ostensible) owners of the company attempting to exert control over the people who are allegedly just hired to run it?
"Shareholder revolt" in the LA Times, "Shareholder insurrection" in TFS, and this was reporting on a vote, taken by shareholders, on the board members(notably, unlike political elections, the incumbent remains in office unless at least half of voting stock votes against them, not by actually having to compete against other candidates for votes). Two of the directors barely survived, at 54 and 55 percent respectively.
Autonomy knows math, but not http or html (Score:3, Interesting)
Having worked with Autonomy on multiple occasions, my chief complaint is that while their software may be incredibly capable in the math and statistics arenas, they can't do web development to save their souls. A virtually complete lack of comprehension of HTTP, SSL, and HTML is all you can expect from their engineers.
It's more than the traditional "I don't want to customize my software even though I only have 20 potential clients so I will call it COTS" crap that we all hate so well. They cobble together so many layers of gunk that there is no way for them to understand what is actually happening between their servers and clients leaving them with no way to fix problems even if they wanted to.
Re:Focus on fundamentals! (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course lets not forget the dark side of big data, the NSA and FBI can use the vast volume of data they collect to create statistical profiles of the average American. Any American outside the average is obviously going to be a target for additional investigation.
The Serious Fraud Office are themselves Autonomy customers, so at the moment they are scratching their heads wondering whether they can conduct the investigation ithout a conflct of interest.