OpenText Tempts Autonomy Customers And Attacks HP

Rival competitor OpenText is seeking to capitalise on the market uncertainty between Hewlett-Packard and its Autonomy unit.

To this end, OpenText is offering a new deal for current Autonomy customers: Trade in valid licences for OpenText licences at no change in cost.

Trade-in Deal

In this way, OpenText President and CEO Mark Barrenechea told eWEEK, users will have not only attain peace of mind about whether the product will continued to be supported, but also they might find that OpenText to be a better fit for their enterprise information management systems.

Details of the deal can be found here.

Based on their existing products and needs, Barrenechea said, customers will be matched with comparable – and in most cases, more comprehensive, he claimed – functionality using OpenText offerings.

“Autonomy’s Interwoven and iManage products can be readily replaced with OpenText’s Web Experience Management (WEM) and eDOCS solutions respectively. OpenText’s Records Management will serve as a substitute to Autonomy’s Meridio, MDY, iLumen, and the former Iron Mountain information governance products; and OpenText’s MBPM will constitute an effective upgrade for Cardiff BPM customers,” Barrenechea said.

Waterloo, Ontario-based OpenText will work closely with Autonomy customers to help them with  minimal disruption to their organisation, Barrenechea said.

OpenText also offers new products, such as OpenText InfoFusion, to greatly simplify and accelerate the process. This trade-in offer expires Dec. 31, 2012, Barrenechea said.

Management Dispute

HP contends that it isn’t having issues with the software Autonomy has developed and sells to about 16,000 customers worldwide, but it has disagreement with the founder and former CEO of the company, Mike Lynch, about how the books were handled.

Autonomy’s software handles control of unstructured data for enterprises. It makes search engines that help companies find vital information stored across computer networks.

Acquiring the company was part of an attempt by HP to strengthen its portfolio of high-value products and services for corporations and government agencies.

HP Attack

HP is a well-respected company with a long and admirable history, but it has some serious corporate-level problems to solve, Barrenechea said.

“First of all, all of their main lines of business involve commodities,” he told eWEEK. “Printers, servers, PCs – all commodities at this point. Its data centre strategy is all old-style EDS, not new style cloud. In software, they have no new applications and no database. In systems management software, there are five companies already in this market.

“In new-age software, Autonomy was supposed to reinvent HP. They just wrote it off (for $8.8 billion / £5.3bn on the quarterly SEC report). HP itself is a commodity and can be replaced.  They have nothing unique.”

Barrenechea compared HP with the 1950s Alfred Hitchcock movie, “The Trouble With Harry” (1954; starring John Forsythe and Shirley MacLaine), about the mysterious death of a man in a small East Coast town.

“The trouble with Harry? He was dead, starring Forsythe and MacLaine. The trouble with HP? Strategy, starring Meg (Whitman, HP’s CEO) and Ray (Lane, chairman of the HP board),” Barrenechea said.

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Originally published on eWeek.