by Angela Guess
Derrick Harris has commented on HP’s recent acquisition of Autonomy, saying, “Hewlett-Packard took a lot of flak when it decided to buy Autonomy for $10 billion, but if big data is a worthwhile investment, perhaps HP’s alleged extravagance will pay off. In a phone call Thursday afternoon, Autonomy Chief Marketing Officer Nicole Eagan explained to me why she thinks HP is in a good position to compete with IBM, Oracle and the rest of its peers when it comes to analytics.”
Harris continues, “Autonomy has been painted primarily as an enterprise search company, but that might not be a fair characterization. According to Eagan, the company’s IDOL (Intelligent Data Operating Platform) is designed to work with any type of data, and lets Autonomy’s products do everything from, yes, search to analysis of videos to sentiment analysis of social media data. In fact, she said, Autonomy can be a good replacement even for Hadoop, especially for more-complex workloads such as natural-language processing.”
Harris adds, “Whereas Hadoop itself is just the data-processing engine that requires a natural-language processing layer to be bolted on, Eagan said Autonomy can do the same job by itself and more completely because it’s designed to decipher intent even from poorly expressed language.”
photo credit: HP
