Most of the discussion about HP’s bid for Autonomy is focused on the impact on HP - primarily the hope that it will make its software business a contender. But as the posts from my colleagues Richard Holway and Anthony Miller indicate (see Leo’s titanic decisions to reshape HP and RIP the Best of British Software), with HP’s track record around game changing acquisitions, this is very doubtful.
What does it mean for Autonomy? In the statement announcing the news, Autonomy founder and CEO Mike Lynch’s bid-backing comment was that: “From our foundation in 1996, we have been driven by one shared vision: to fundamentally change the IT industry by revolutionising the way people interact with information. HP shares this vision and provides Autonomy with the platform to bring our world-leading technology and innovation to a truly global stage, making the shift to a future age of the information economy a reality."
This statement raises many questions but one thing that jumps out is that surely the move to a global stage would be best served by a recognised software expert. In the software space, HP is known for its infrastructure and application management software, which is a far cry from Autonomy’s area of pattern recognition, unstructured data management and discovery, and barely touches the massive business software space. HP’s activity around BI, analytics and information management products (the closet offerings to Autonomy’s software) is in a state of change and no clear direction is apparent.
HP stopped actively selling its albeit aged Neoview data warehouse platform (acquired via Compaq) earlier this year, then shortly afterwards acquired analytic database vendor Vertica. It has maintained a professional services consultancy providing BI and data warehousing services, and it has a partnership with Microsoft to provide data warehouse appliances (Microsoft SQL Server on HP hardware). Autonomy will no doubt join this mix but unless a coherent strategy emerges, its move to a “truly global stage” will be challenging to say the least.
Given the limited synergy between the two companies, at this point in time it is difficult to see precisely how Autonomy will benefit from the move. If HP intends using Autonomy and its own related assets as the basis for a concerted push into the analytics and information management space, Autonomy could benefit. This area is certainly outperforming other software areas. But the question that can’t be ignored is how capable a vendor with a very limited software heritage is of making it work.
