After making what is widely considered to be one of the most disastrous acquisitions in the history of IT from a financial perspective, Hewlett-Packard has begun making good on its promise to leverage the enterprise search technology it gained with the acquisition of Autonomy across its product lines.
Most recently, HP announced an implementation of Autonomy for the cloud that is embedded within version 7.1 of HP Application Information Optimizer (AIO). The basic idea is to leverage the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software that HP gained with the acquisition of Autonomy to create a hybrid approach to managing archive data. According to Joe Garber, vice president of marketing, information governance, at HP Autonomy, AIO can be deployed on the cloud service of choice by the customer and then integrated with a local instance of IDOL to automate the archiving process.
HP followed up that effort with an announcement of an instance of Autonomy that has been optimized for marketing organizations. HP Digital Marketing Hub leverages Autonomy and the rest of the HP HAVEn Big Data portfolio to create a platform through which customers can invoke a cloud service that integrates data from multiple marketing applications in a way that allows Big Data analytics to be applied. The end goal is to use all the information the marketing department already collects to better identify customer segments and then develop unique campaigns that would specifically appeal to those customers.
Then this week, HP announced that HP Qfiniti 10, the company’s call center software, is now also infused with IDOL. That announcement followed previous product introductions related to IDOL that include embedding Autonomy in everything from printers to storage systems.
It’s too early to say if all this research and development will pay off for HP. But the one thing that is for certain is that IDOL is extending the capabilities of a raft of HP products and services in ways that competitors can’t currently match. The challenge, of course, will be getting customers to appreciate IDOL enough to worship it as much as HP does.
