While there’s no doubt that Hewlett-Packard’s information management strategy surrounding Big Data has taken quite a drubbing in recent weeks following allegations of fraud within the HP Autonomy business unit, the fact remains that technologies such as the Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) software from Autonomy, along with the SQL-based Vertica analytics databases that HP acquired in 2011, remain quite viable.
Granted, they may be a little ahead of their time in terms of the ability of IT organizations to implement them, but the Big Data management problems they collectively address are not going away anytime soon.
To make it easier for IT organizations to tackle these problems, HP, at its Discover 2012 conference today, launched two sets of applications that are intended to make Autonomy and Vertica technologies more accessible for law firms and marketers.
The HP Autonomy Legal Performance Suite is a cloud-based platform based on Autonomy IDOL software. The platform automatically indexes enterprise data to create an information governance strategy that spans archiving, e-discovery, along with enterprise content, document and records management.
The HP Autonomy Marketing Performance Suite provides a cloud-based platform designed to help organizations optimize marketing spend and increase revenue across all channels. The platform uses HP information management technologies to handle pay-per-click optimization, Web content management, rich-media management, along with call center, social media and sentiment analytics.
HP needs to get back on the information management horse as quickly as possible. Obviously, the write down of the value of the acquisition of Autonomy gives a lot of organizations cause for pause. Conversely, there are probably just as many people who never heard of Autonomy and are wondering what all the fuss is about. In either scenario, Andrew Joiner, general manager for emerging technology at HP, says the thing to remember about either Autonomy or Vertica is that they are enabling technologies, which means what really matters is the applications that provide the true value to be gained from investing in these technologies in the first place.
Of course, there are other ways of building those applications, which, from an HP perspective, is the one reason why they need to get back on the Big Data management horse, because it’s about to take off with or without HP.