HP Shows Planned Autonomy Products At Partner Conference

Hewlett-Packard has demonstrated some of the latest products from Autonomy, the company it acquired last year in a $10.3 billion (£6.6bn) takeover.

The products were showcased by Mike Lynch (pictured), the former Autonomy CEO and current HP vice-president of Information Management, during the HP Global Partner Conference, a reseller gathering in Las Vegas.

Something to prove

HP is working on Autonomy-based hardware appliances that will power enterprise search and will compete with Google’s Search Appliance. The announcement of this hardware/software combination has been noted as unsurprising given Autonomy’s expertise in enterprise search.

Companies that are required to hold onto vast amounts of data for legal reasons but have no way of searching for it online could be a potential market for Autonomy.

HP is also working on mobile apps that allow users to view images of physical objects, such as a movie poster, and interact with them with them online. In addition to this Augmented Reality (AR) application, Lynch also demonstrated an application that showed related links when a video was running.

The first Autonomy product since the takeover, Idol 10, was revealed at the HP Discover event in Vienna last November. Idol aims to analyse unstructured data in real time to help enterprises cope with the explosion of data.

The takeover, approved last October, has been criticised by many, including Oracle, for being too costly for investors. It is believed that the high cost of the acquisition led to former CEO Leo Apotheker’s departure from the company.