Autonomy (company)
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| Industry | Information technology |
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| Fate | Acquired by Micro Focus |
| Founded | June 1996 (as Autonomy Corporation PLC) Cambridge, England, U.K. |
| Founder |
Michael Richard Lynch David Tabizel Richard Gaunt |
| Headquarters |
Cambridge, United Kingdom San Francisco, United States |
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Area served
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Global |
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Key people
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Robert Youngjohns (SVP & General Manager) |
| Products | Big data analytics, information governance, data protection and digital marketing |
| Parent | Micro Focus |
| Website | www.autonomy.com |
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| Autonomy Corporation headquarters at Cambridge Business Park. |
HP Autonomy, previously Autonomy Corporation PLC, is a multinational enterprise software company founded in Cambridge, United Kingdom in 1996.
Originally, the company specialised in analysis of large scale unstructured "big data", becoming the UK's largest and most successfulsoftware business by 2010. It used a combination of technologies born out of research at the University of Cambridge and developed a variety of enterprise search and knowledge management applications using adaptive pattern recognition techniques centered on Bayesian inference in conjunction with traditional methods. It maintained an aggressively entrepreneurial marketing approach, and controls described as a "rod of iron", which was said to include zero tolerance and firing the weakest 5% of its sales force each quarter, while the best sales staff "like rock stars".
Autonomy was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in October 2011. The deal valued Autonomy at $11.7 billion (£7.4 billion) with a premium of around 79% over market price that was widely criticized as "absurdly high", a "botched strategy shift" and a "chaotic" attempt to rapidly reposition HP and enhance earnings by expanding the high-margin software services sector. Within a year, major culture clashes became apparent and HP had written off $8.8 billion of Autonomy's value. HP claims this resulted from "accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures" by the previous management, who in turn accuse HP of a "textbook example of defensive stalling" to conceal evidence of its own prior knowledge and gross mismanagement and undermining of the company, noting public awareness since 2009 of its financial reporting issues and that even HP's CFO disagreed with the price paid. External observers generally state that only a small part of the write-off appears to be due to accounting mis-statements, and that HP had overpaid for businesses previously.
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Wikipedia