HP to buy Autonomy for $11 billion
ft.com
ft.com
You also have to consider that making $1.2bn back on the Palm purchase wouldn't be all that difficult right now. HP has the straight forward option of simply selling the Palm patent portfolio of 1,600 patents from a company that was in the handheld device space long before most of the current players.
Yes. I would say that webOS will more than likely be the beOS of the mobile world. Not that the two OS's are similar technologically, but in that they're both generally held in fairly high esteem but no one actually uses them.
I know it powers the FT's search facility and they joke about how useless it is.
My only explanation has been that it perhaps has a heavy focus on intelligence work.
I hope HP are prepared for some lengthy due diligence.
About 2000-2001 the company I was working for tried to buy a license to use their search software on our internal documents. It all fell apart for various reasons, including a price tag that was well in to six figures (Sterling) may even have been almost £1,000,000 my memory fails me as it wasn't going to be a good fit for our project anyway (long story.)
The tech they had then was very impressive when demoed, and I've heard even more amazing things about it since, but again, all in demos. I've not used the software direct, partly because I haven't worked for companies that could afford to use it.
I spent some time there in consulting, which amounted to attempting to convince customers that the demos they'd bought actually existed. In general, the demos were mixes of Perl and JavaScript that barely held together for the length of the demo, let alone scaled. Autonomy did have some internal large-scale success stories, but they tended to involve heroic (and large uncompensated) work after the sale and customers who were willing to repeatedly threaten to sue until said work was done.
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.
I think the obstacles for a startup wouldn't come from Autonomy's core techology---more the amount of stuff they've acquired around the edges. Pieces like KeyView (which is fairly good at reading just about any file format you care to mention) make the whole Autonomy package much more attractive than their search tech would be on its own. Plus, as you said, you have to be willing and able to compete with their sales force, and that seems like a soul-selling endeavor from the beginning.
The problem they have (well at least had when I was there a few years ago) is that nobody understands it all anymore. They've acquired so much technology and have such a high turn over rate of developers (barring a few extremely well rewarded key seniors) that its a constant uphill struggle to change anything or improve significantly, so developers have to just patch things up as best they can.
That burden will eventually catch up with them I would think, but I'm always surprised at how long a bad code-base can be kept alive.
I hated using the product (specifically, iManage) because it was clearly not designed by or for users. It's just another slapped-on solution to shortcomings in the Microsoft platform (closed/obscure document format, lack of public APIs, etc.) I was not impressed by the product in any way whatsoever.
Very old-school approach. Fancy books, etc. We have a stack of beautifully produced product viewbook things from propping up our fax machine.
BUT... keep in mind, they intentionally don't educate their pre- and post-sales folks about the actual capabilities and flaws in their approach. The training I got was basically useless---a week of having someone read the getting started guide to us.
Apparently, one of the earlier sales engineers had written a "real guide to IDOL" or some such, intended to help new sales engineers actually know what to do. Autonomy's CTO had all copies of it deleted, because it referred to bugs and shortcomings that they'd signed contracts claiming didn't exist.
Damn, until now I'd missed that this wasn't "only" about phones and pads; HP's planning to become a software-only company! Very saddening.
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.
what does that even mean?!
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.
It certainly is a hell of a place to work as a developer. I was almost grateful for it in a way, it was my first professional developer job (they tend to hire fresh meat). But it taught me a lot about what not to do, and was a proving ground for my ability to work under pressure.
I'd almost recommend doing a stint in a place like it, makes you appreciate all your jobs afterwards. :-)
Why would HP pay 3X its market value?
Adding to the normal premiums are the current market conditions and the vast sums of liquid assets large tech companies are sitting on. Firstly the general market is down which usually means shares of healthy companies are "undervalued" (difficult to tell if they really are, but that's the consensus). Secondly liquid assets are "expensive" to own at the moment, some banks are charging negative interest on large deposits and bonds are sitting at around 0%. If you're a tech company sitting on huge piles of cash this means you want to spend that money on anything as long as it gives more than 0% interest. Shareholders know that companies have a lot of money to spend so they can demand very high premiums.
Google bought Motorola mobility at a 63% premium so HP buying at 79% isn't all that strange. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple and Microsoft aren't also considering some big takeovers (GIGAOM reported that microsoft was also considering buyingMotorola) because this is the time to get get rid of those big piles of money they have.