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Comment by AlexMuir | Hacker News Reader

I've always thought that Autonomy had a strong whiff of fraud about it. I never hear anyone talk about working there, their financial reporting is often shadier than Groupon's, there's a Madoff-esque figure at the top (in the sense that he seems to be treated as almost godlike), and no-one seems to use its products.

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.

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I worked for them for a couple of years as a developer. They do have an underlying core technology developed in the very early days of the company which they have exploited to the absolute maximum possible. It works fairly well, but Bayesian analysis of documents is beginning to feel a little old hat.

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.

Sounds like they might have been acquired for their sales team rather than their technology!

That is quite likely. They have a huge range of contacts amongst government, educational, financial and just about every other large organisation you can think of. If you wanted to get into retailing software to large business, they would be the people to talk to.

Given the HP CEO was at SAP he is probably wants to compete with Oracle.

As corroboration, my first assignment at Autonomy basically amounted to writing (on-site) a component that had been sold without the existence of a single line of code.

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.

Yes, the complete package is what they can offer big business. There are so many pieces to it now that they can turn it to a huge range of different uses.

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've negotiated against Autonomy before, on behalf of a customer. I've also used their products at various jobs. The company conducts itself like most enterprise vendors – everything is about making the sale while limiting the hard commitments that they make to their customers.

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.

That's hilarious. We kicked them out when the Brit super-salesman in a $10k suit made it clear that they are the most expensive product in the space.

Very old-school approach. Fancy books, etc. We have a stack of beautifully produced product viewbook things from propping up our fax machine.

Yeah, I have had similar experience. The start-up that will disrupt the space you speak of is PureDiscovery up north in Dallas. I assisted in a Purediscovery implementation in place of Autonomy and the client will never look back. First, they clearly do not have all the bells and whistles Autonomy has (that dont work that well), but on a side by side basis, I had a Purediscovery Index up in 4 hours and the results are light years better than Autonomy. We do not have to re-index our existing data either which is what I think makes the Purediscovery solution so unique. Its funny for me to see all of the comments now about Autonomy. I have been there! Where have all of these people been the past few years? Spinning plates...love it

Oh man, Autonomy. I know some people who worked there after the Interwoven acquisition. They uniformly described it as a disaster. Million-line codebases with no unit tests (and a UK dev office that didn't care). Routine selling of non-existent features, followed by dev getting shit on because they had to work over the weekend to make a proof-of-concept for it. High-priced sales-engineers who spend 6-8 weeks on site installing stuff, upselling on hardware and software the whole time.

As far as I can tell, the threshold for joining sales engineering there is surprisingly low.

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.

I've met a couple of people who've worked there, one was quite bitchy about working conditions but you could get that at any company.

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.

Autonomy is very good at selling demos for prices at and above what you're listing there.

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.

They have a big building here in Cambridge where they employee 170+ people. The Company has been public for a long time (first floated on EASDAQ back in about 1999). I don't think there's anything shadier about it compared to any other enterprise software company.

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