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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 shadie

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.

paulsilver 15y ago
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.
- jgmatpdx 15y ago
  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.
adamt 15y ago
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.
benjamind 15y ago
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.
- arethuza 15y ago
  Sounds like they might have been acquired for their sales team rather than their technology!
  - benjamind 15y ago
    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.
    - arethuza 15y ago
      Given the HP CEO was at SAP he is probably wants to compete with Oracle.
- jgmatpdx 15y ago
defen 15y ago
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.
- jgmatpdx 15y ago
  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.

paulsilver 15y ago

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.

jgmatpdx 15y ago
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.

adamt 15y ago

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.

benjamind 15y ago

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.

arethuza 15y ago
Sounds like they might have been acquired for their sales team rather than their technology!
- benjamind 15y ago
  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.
  - arethuza 15y ago
    Given the HP CEO was at SAP he is probably wants to compete with Oracle.
jgmatpdx 15y ago

defen 15y ago

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.

jgmatpdx 15y ago
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.